Small world

Joni Mitchell on Emily Carr:  "I love her . . . . It so helps to find a writer whose style I love and maybe it's because she's a painter . . . . I've read a lot of great writers and I go 'Oh, this is a great writer,' but I don't love it. I can't explain it, it's just the way Emily Carr creates a sentence . . . like a songwriter's sentence.  She's extremely gifted at condensing a lot into a very small space. She visually saturates her sentences in a way that's beyond compare to me."   (Quoted in Michelle Mercer's Will You Take Me As I Am.)

I fell in love with Emily Carr's art during a trip to British Columbia years ago, and only recently discovered her writing.  The Book of Small, first published in 1942, is her memoir of early childhood, a portrait of the artist as a minutely observant young girl in frontier Victoria.  Joni Mitchell is right about these sentences: they're saturated with sensory detail.  Rich, fresh, startling. 

From "Sunday":  "Dr. Reid [the Presbyterian minister] had very shiny eyes and very red lips.  He wore a black gown with two little white tabs like the tail of a bird sticking out from under his beard.  He carried a roll in his hand like Moses, and on it were all the things that he was going to say to us."

From "The Cow Yard": "But it was in the Cow Yard that you felt most strongly the warm life-giving existence of the great red-and-white loose-knit Cow."

From "Mrs. Crane," about a neighbor who cared for Small (Carr's name for herself) and her sisters when their mother was ill: "Mary Crane and our Alice were shy little girls.  They sat on the sofa with their dolls in their laps.  Their eyes stared like the dolls' eyes.  Mrs. Crane would not allow dolls to be dressed or undressed in the drawing-room; she said it was not nice."

From "The Bishop and the Canary": "Small had earned the canary and loved him. How she did love him! When they had told her, 'You may take your pick,' and she leaned over the cage and saw the four fluffy yellow balls, too young to have even sung their first song, her breath and her heart acted so queerly that it seemed as if she must strangle. She chose the one with the topknot. He was the first live creature she had ever owned. 'Mine! I shall be his God,' she whispered."

The book flies by and is over before you know it.  Like childhood.