Corresponding Influence: Selected Letters of Emily Carr and Ira Dilworth

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Ira Dilworth was a professor of English, the British Columbia regional
director of the CBC, and, on becoming an intimate friend of Emily Carr,
her advisor, editor, and loyal correspondent. Their exchange of letters
did not begin until early 1940, by which time Carr had been forced
through ill health to give up her ambitious painting expeditions, but
continued until her death in 1945. This was the time of her second
career as an idiosyncratic but endearing writer.

Linda Morra has selected 142 letters out of 440 that are extant (Carr
sometimes wrote to Dilworth as many as five times a week). The
correspondence is significant for two reasons: for its intrinsic
interest as an exchange between two interesting and complex people; and
above all for Carr’s forthright and often pungent style (unconcerned
about spelling and innocent of the rules of punctuation and grammar)
that reveals the painter even more directly than the apparently
spontaneous style of her published writings.

This correspondence must have been especially difficult to edit on
account of the handwriting of both parties, Carr’s unorthodoxies of
syntax, and her habit of writing at high speed without rereading,
inserting omitted words, or smoothing out sentence construction. That
said, one must also say that, although Morra has brought a good deal of
order to comparative chaos, the standard of editing still leaves much to
be desired. I noticed quite a few misprints or apparent
mistranscriptions; thus, part of one letter is reproduced in facsimile
and the printed text should obviously read “creaks” instead of
“creates.” Not all Carr’s spellings are corrected;
“lightening” for “lightning” is only one of several examples.
Literary annotations are thorough, but needed historical explanations
(the impact of Pearl Harbor, for instance) are generally absent.
Individuals are glossed in notes, but are often difficult to trace when
only first names appear in subsequent references.

Nonetheless, though repetitious at times, this is an engaging
correspondence and its publication is welcome.