Pause: A Sketch Book

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

Pause deals with a low point in Emily Carr’s life—18 months (15
according to Maria Tippett in the foreword) spent improbably at an East
Anglian sanatorium, designed for tuberculosis patients, where she
endeavored to recover from a breakdown brought on by overwork at the
School of Art in London and the misery of being in England. The medical
treatment was bizarre, except in one respect: she was allowed to raise
birds, ostensibly to bring back to British Columbia (where there were
almost no songbirds).

Carr was down but not out, as the sketches she made at the time
testify. Many are simply amusing, but others have a delicacy of
observation and a thrusting energy that make clear that her talent was
unsubdued by adversity. In addition to these contemporary sketches,
Pause consists of a series of descriptions and anecdotes Carr wrote in
1938 about life at Sunhill and about the other inmates and staff; these
have a freshness of observation that makes it difficult to believe they
were composed so long after the events they describe. It is easy to
believe Carr, however, when she writes, “I was not always polite, not
always biddable.” Essentially, she was “thoroughly un-English,”
the exact reverse of her father, who, as she writes in The Book of
Small, thought “everything English was much better than anything
Canadian.” Neither transplanted easily, but fortunately Carr’s life
in England was temporary.

Pause was first published in 1953, long enough ago to make a second
edition extremely welcome. Newcomers to Emily Carr’s writing might
prefer to begin with The Book of Small and continue with Growing Pains,
which deals briefly with the episode that Pause explores more
thoroughly. Carr enthusiasts will simply delight in the fact that Pause
is once again available, for you cannot have too much of a national
treasure.