Hundreds and Thousands (29 page)

IT’S A STRAIGHT-ON-END DELUGE
. The rain doesn’t come in drops but in long streaks like macaroni. Basements are flooded (not mine). Garage roofs collapsed in Vancouver under the snow. Ships are grounded on the dry land, which I suppose was so bepuddled that they mistook it for sea. Bad weather conditions of all sorts abound, scooting from one variety into another with violent transitions. People are bruised and bumped and broken by falls and slithers and tumbles. There’s a big incendiary mill fire, and sudden deaths, and crueler slow deaths, and humanity
sitting and saying, “What next?” The bulbs are bravely sprouting, facing their fresh green babyhood unconcerned and orderly. The robins have demolished all the haws during the snap and have shuffled off elsewhere since the thaw.

I had a visitor from Germany yesterday. She says the tendency in German art today is to give minute surface detail. She had seen, she said, no work just like mine.

Last night I did not sleep for wondering foolishly what I would do about a studio if I exchanged my house, and I got moiled up and bewildered. Surely art is bigger than four walls and a top light. It’s a little person who can’t paint big in a small place, and there’s always outdoors in summer.

THE PROVINCIAL LIBRARY BUILDING
is heavy, ornate — horrible. I can’t imagine it heavier or more horrible than when the Art Historical Society are sitting uncomfortably humped in its middle. The ceiling of the library is heavily beamed and lumped with hideous blobbed plaster ornaments in oblong squares like an upside-down graveyard under snow, and there is a white marble coping round the dead fireplace. Never-read, dry-bones of books are locked under the glass coffin-like cases along the walls, and wherever there aren’t books there are horrible light-brown wooden floral wreaths and sprays. They look like brown paper. Every manner of flower, fruit, seed pod, vegetable and grain is represented, as though there was to be another flood and a pair of each specimen had to be preserved.

In the front of the room was a square table. The President man and the Secretary woman sat at it. There was a tray with a glass jug of water and a tumbler which the President banged to call the meeting to order. The members were stolid. I felt dreadfully sorry
for the janitor. He was a tired-looking man leaning on his broom just outside the open door waiting to sweep out. I wanted to yell, “Sweep, sweep them out. Choke them in their own dust. Turn the ceiling upside-down and bury them under the white plaster oblongs.” On they droned about preserving the old buildings and emulating England whose power and glory was in preserving her past. Hang them all! Why can’t they die and move on? The needs of today are pressing. The past is past.

Dr. Clem Davies preached on Moses seeing but not entering the promised land. Moses knew God
face to face.
I had a little speech on the ideals of Indian art in my pocket all typed and threw it into the collection dish instead of my offering in its envelope. What on earth would Clem think at such an offering? And I am afraid it had my name on it.

An artist came yesterday and brought a thing for me to criticize, and he did not like it when I did. It had some nice things in it and some foolishness. He had tried to distort for the sake of queerness. Distortion is all right for emphasis — to get your point over. There is something dramatic (blood and thunder threatening) about sky and houses looking dour. But there was nothing spiritual, nothing that hoisted the soul a little. Oh, it is difficult, but should not be difficult if we lived nearer to God and got our inspiration direct. If one could only rise and strike out from the heights, but I suppose first we must climb to the rise above the trivial snippiness, quit bickering and open our eyes wider and get stiller — quit fussing. Perhaps the promises given to our children and children’s children work out in old maids through the channels of art. Supposing one could go up into a mountain and see the expressions of future generations,
showing the unripe strivings in our own lives brought to fruit in them. We’d know the grind and perplexities we went through were part of the foundation.

I WISH I KNEW
if I really am as
completely
beastly a person as Lizzie makes me out. She doesn’t allow me one good thought or feeling or trait. I come back from visiting her so discouraged with myself. She has the faculty for hauling all one’s worst to the surface. At the age of four, and she was eight, she took me to a child’s party at the Langleys’. I remember her wrathful indignation over my behaviour there, and telling Mother she’d never take me to a party again, as I was a disgrace. I jammed my hands at tea, lost my little white cotton gloves, cried for a prize at “Aunt Sally.” I remember Mother kissed her fat disgraceful baby and did not pay much attention to all the wickedness.

I feel very,
very
old, round a hundred I should say, maybe more — just a tired, nothing-left feel; writing a humbug, painting a bore. I could sleep, sleep. I tell myself “shame,” put forth a big effort and wash all the outside steps or make soap, or wash and get tireder. My manuscripts are all back from everywhere. Why do
all
one’s friends seem to go back on you altogether? They might take turns. Funny about friends, you want them frightfully, but you can’t find any to fit. Nothing in you and them that answers each other, only commonplaces — weather conditions, ailments or food — beyond that, blank. They slam the door of their innards and you slam the door of yours.

When I contemplate the possibility of selling this place and moving I am in a panic. When I think of not selling and not being
able to rent and not paying my taxes and the city gobbling my home into its maw, I’m in a quadruple panic, and where’s your faith? If one could only put their finger definitely on God! Yet what more does one want when miracles are popping up every single second?
Everything’s
a miracle. Every time we lift a finger or do a thing, it’s a miracle that we could no wise perform alone.

WELL, TODAY HAS
been like a day of lead. Why are there days when yeast, gunpowder and champagne are lifeless and you are brown and sagging as a rotten apple, days when one
longs
for somebody with their whole soul? Somebody that they never met or knew or saw. Somebody with no body or appearance but with an enormous love and sympathy who would not only give to you but call out from you oceans of sweetness and the lovely feel of giving it out with a lavish hand to someone who
wanted
it, giving it generously and unashamed.

LIFE’S HIDEOUS JUST NOW
, everyone anxious and pinched and unnatural and sore about something. Some wicked fairy has turned all the blood and flesh hearts into affairs of fire and lead and stone, with all the warm soft gone out, just a hard, dry ache and a hungry want. Where have you gone to, Joy? You are ached out of existence.

I AM PAINTING A SKY
. A big tree butts up into it on one side, and there is a slope in the corner with pines. These are only to give distance. The subject is sky, starting lavender beneath the trees and rising into smoother hollow air space, greenish in tone, merging into laced clouds and then into deep, bottomless blue, not flat and smooth like the centre part of the sky, but loose,
coming forward. There is to be
one
sweeping movement through the whole air, an ascending movement, high and fathomless. The movement must connect with each part, taking great care with the articulation. A movement floating up. It is a study in movement, designed movement — very subtle.

a NEWSPAPER CRITICISM
on the art exhibit, in which I was especially mentioned — my work “Blunden Harbour,” and the little spindly pine tree peeking up into the sky. Art criticism was flowery, from a professor of English at the University. The fact that the canvas was a sky study entirely missed them. Below was a low, beaten stretch of earth; they called it “the thicket.” It was only an incidental. The sky was the subject. What rubbish these critics are, or is it one’s own stupidity in blundering to the point? The professor dipped out feathery fluff, but — well — there you are.

My Indian story, “Hully-up Paper” back from International Correspondence Criticism Service. The literary critic squashed my story flat — not marketable, no plot, only a bit of narrative. Might pass in a Canadian magazine, but not in an American since “it lacks the elements that American magazines require.” “Not good enough to make the grade with commercial markets,” was his criticism. One
does
get disheartened, no good denying. Is it pure conceit that makes one feel so squashed? The truth of it is I don’t
want to
write that popular mechanical twaddle that is called for. I know my stuff is poor in wording and expression, construction. But what joy is there in blowing oneself up with high flavoured impossibilities of plots lacking reality when one longs to just express simply the everyday lovely realities that happen in front of your nose? I suppose if I had the education I
would express these realities so they were readable. What is this rebellion inside me? Rebellion against orthodox mechanics. Is it egotistical conceit? Or life’s ardor dimming? Or outworn sentimentality? I want dreadfully to express something, but why? I think, old girl, you’d better quit writing.

IF YOU DON’T WRITE
things down where do they go? Into the lazy bog of neglected opportunities. Thoughts we might have developed, actions we might have accomplished. Inertia and deadness. Look what is happening in the garden this very minute. All the little winter thoughts of it are bursting forth. The earth has softened down, opened up, paid attention, and developed her thoughts. Now there is a roaring hubbub, a torrent of growth gushing forth that won’t be stopped because the dear old earth has nursed and treasured her thoughts deep down in the winter quiet. Now they are paying her back gloriously. If only we did our part as faithfully.

A WOMAN CAME
to my studio. She is an artist with two children and an invalid husband to support. I esteemed her very much. She said, “I cannot paint. It takes all my strength to support my children and bring them up to think of beautiful things, to be with them and share with them in their impressionable years. I feel if I try to teach a good
honest
commercial art that is of service to my pupils, I am doing more good than dabbling around in paint myself, doing weary and unconsciously weak work.”

She was really interested in my work. She said that it appealed to her like religion. Art and religion you can’t separate, for real art is religion, a search for the beauty of God deep in all things.

I HAD VISITORS
, an artist that also showed at the Vancouver show and his sister-in-law. Why can’t I take all the nice things they say like a dainty dish one is offered by a hostess? Help oneself and be thankful and eat it with gusto! I just can’t. I
cannot
feel that the things they say are merited. Oh, I wish I could! It would be so comfortable to smack my lips and say, “That’s me. I
deserve
their praise. My work is good. All they say is true, likening me to Van Gogh, saying my work will live, and all the slop about its profundity and depth and meaning.” But there is the consciousness of how I’ve
wanted
to sink right into it and absorb and how my mind has wandered from the point, on and on, and I’ve dragged it back and
forced
it instead of opening myself up and letting it fill me and then gush out at my finger-tips, powerless to hold it back. When I read of artists who worked and worked, patiently expanding through the years, and all their thoroughness in mastering technique, and then look at my own spatter, I realize that it has no construction. It is raw, clumsy, unfinished. Then I feel a lazy shirker and I am sure that those who applaud my efforts don’t realize or recognize good work or they’d see the failings of mine.

Everyone is waiting and waiting and waiting these days and nobody knows for what. There is a lonely blue brooding over everything. Everything is so difficult. People’s bodies and hearts are aching. It is not all because people’s purses are empty. It’s some other dreary, lonesome thing. We’re off the boil, no cheerful sing, no quivering lid, just a sullen lukewarmness, sooted on the bottom and furred within. Oh for a jolly old fire to set life’s kettle singing and bubbling and steaming!

HOUSECLEANING IS NOT
so bad when you throw your heart into it. I’ve kalsomined four rooms, with their ceilings and walls (and floors too, but that I had to scrub away after). They began to smell nice. All the clean sparkling dishes and pans look so glad and yell out, “Put me here,” as if the scrubbed shelf was their Heaven they longed to be boosted into. Perhaps it’s the last time I’ll have the privilege of cleaning dear old 646. It’s so thrilling to go down the morning after to see if the evil old stains are really obliterated now the kalsomine is dry. Only one does have much too many things. I hoard trash. There’s all sorts of things, and repairs to other things, to be done with oddments. I’m a specialist in utilizing refuse.

There’s something
honest
about getting into bed with every muscle aching from real straight domestics, honestly acquired. Sort of a brick in your character building.

Cleaning one’s domicile is terribly saddening. Out of every out-of-the-way corner that one delves into, after the dust accumulation that is not disturbed more than annually, something comes to light that reminds one of an incident or a person and sets up an ache inside you, a photo, or a letter or a little gift. Letters are the worst to make you ache. Somebody you’d nearly forgotten and you don’t know if they are dead or still alive, and you wonder how the intimate friendliness could have died; how after being so close you are so far. The dead ones are nearer and not half so saddening as the “uncertains.” And there are congratulation letters on little successes and sympathetic letters about disappointments, and giggly letters and indignant ones, and the pages of life that have been glued up all these years suddenly seem to loosen up so you can read them again, and just as
you are in the middle of reading, suddenly they stick together again and stay silent till next year’s big clean.