Canadian Writers Abroad

I have tried before to write about Emily Carr’s mysterious illness of hysteria and her time in the East Anglia Sanatorium in England. She was in England to study art, which she did in London, Boxford in Berkshire, St. Ives in Cornwall, and Bushey in Hertfordshire, from 1899-1904, until she was forbidden to work at the Sanatorium in Nayland, Suffolk in 1903. Intrigued, I took myself off to various research facilities, with which London is blessed: to the British Library, to read about hysteria; to the Wellcome Library, to read about Dr Jane Walker, who prescribed such treatment as fresh air, massage, electricity, heavy diet, and rest. Finally, I contacted the Suffolk Record Office of Bury St Edmonds in Suffolk, where the sanatorium was located; they confirmed that Carr was “Cured” of “Hysteria” from January 12, 1903 to March 17, 1904. While I was living in London, we made a trip to visit the train station, the village nearby, and the building that housed the sanatorium. After visiting Victoria, I dredged up the photos and decided to try again — nearly two months ago. I don’t know what stops me from finishing this piece, but I’ve begun to wonder if, as Emily Carr writes in her book about the San, Pause, they didn’t talk about illness, and whether her adoption of this very British trait somehow stays my hand. So here I am, trying again.

What put Emily Carr in the sanatorium for over a year? As I mentioned last time, the answers vary. Let’s take a closer look. The official diagnosis on record at the Sanatorium is: “Hysteria” (from January 12, 1903 to March 17, 1904). But if she truly suffered from hysteria, why was she sent to a newly-opened TB institution rather than to a mental hospital?

Car wrote and drew the sketches for Pause: A Sketch Book immediately after leaving the San, using fictional names, while awaiting the start of an art course. The small book was published years later, posthumously, by her executor, Ira Dilworth. In it, she refers to her condition obliquely. Her focus is on the birds she rears from fledglings, the other inmates and the staff. In Pause, she calls the San’s birds “the chiefest, most joyous thing.” (p. 14) In Hundreds and Thousands: the Journals of Emily Carr, she mentions, in January 1938, working on a chapter of her memoir called “Birds”: “How dreadfully real the places and people are as they come back to me! The story is a bit grim so far but I want to weave it round the birds, give it the light, pert twist of the birds. Birds are not tragic.” (p. 299)

It opens with an Author’s Note dated March 1903, addressed The Sanatorium, Nayland, Colchester, Suffolk. In this note she refers to herself as “the fat girl”: “By and by illness came and the fat girl subsided into a San with a limp and a stutter.” Her plans to rear songbirds to take to Canada “buck up” the fat girl. The “fat girl” was 32 when she entered the Sanatorium. But here we have a first mention of a symptom: a limp and a stutter. Did this limp come from her botched toe amputation?

We come to her most important symptom: problems with her heart. Describing the Saturday morning routine of Dr Bottle’s examinations, which included a portable weigh scale and “soundings and tappings” of the lung patients, she adds, “From these lung soundings I was exempt, but my heart got them good and plenty later.” (p. 22) Heart issues may have been exacerbated by three months’ bedrest (p. 33) and the heavy meals of the San. In “A Rabbit Warren and a Piggery,” she writes: “My walks were not set by the Doctors like those of the T.B. patients. I was free to walk where I would, providing it was not too far, and I did not overtire.” (p. 99) One day the doctor comes with her, and after the doctor forbids her from walking that far again, she is suddenly tired: “As I sat on the edge of the ditch I was angry with pieces of me. I talked to my legs. I said, “You silly old legs, why must you tremble?” And to my heart, “You spluttering, silly heart. Why must you act up?” I smacked the leg that did not feel with my stick, then I got up and followed Doctor.” (p. 104).

Her description of the San picnic, held annually in the church cemetery, ignoring weather, is very funny. Of course it rains on their woollens. “Blobs of rain dripped off our tams, sogging the bread and dripping down our collars. The men, who never wore hats, tossed the water from their hair with angry shakes; even so, dripping tangles of hair leaked into their eyes, and ran down their faces like floods of tears. Our laps filled with rain in spite of the London Times underneath us. It was found best to eat standing – one could drain better.” (p. 122).

Having lingered eighteen months, she agrees to try a new “more or less experimental” treatment, which we learn about in Growing Pains. “The treatment consisted of a great deal of massage, a great deal of electricity and very heavy feeding.” (p. 255) “The electricity sent me nearly mad. I was not allowed to read, to talk, to think. By degrees I gained a little strength but my nerves and spirit were in a jangle.” (Growing Pains p. 257) This treatment lasted two months.

In Emily Carr: A Biography (Oxford UP, 1979), Maria Tippett gathers up the various explanations offered by Carr in different sources, and tallies them up as proof that Carr did indeed suffer from hysteria. She argues that Carr was already deteriorating mentally and physically, from the sun-induced headaches in St Ives to overeating in Bushey. After leaving Bushey, she had bronchitis, influenza, and fell down the stairs at her boarding house in the summer of 1902. For six weeks she had intense headaches, and vomiting. Tippett also suggests heartbreak over Sammy Blake. Tippett adds in the symptoms mentioned in Pause – numbness, stuttering, weeping, paralysis in one leg – and concludes that these are “typical symptoms of conversion reaction.” (p. 58)

My inclination is to blame the physical for the mental distress, rather than the other way around. Her time in London was marred by a toe amputation, by the illnesses that come from living in and moving around a crowded city. She worked long hours when she was enrolled in her courses, and could indeed have simply been exhausted. And hurt by English condescension toward the colonial. Then again, her fall on the stairs could have caused concussion. “For six weeks I lay scarcely caring which way things went.” (Growing Pains p. 245) The reaction to seaside sun in two locations indicates migraines. She mentions neuralgia in Pause. And then there is her annoyance at her “spluttering, silly heart.” In Growing Pains, she writes that she fainted watching Queen Victoria’s funeral procession, also indicative of heart or blood pressure issues.

What is not acknowledged by Carr, or Tippett, is that to leave one’s home country to live in another can be a strain on a person’s physical and mental well-being. This could have been the case for Carr, who blamed her unhappiness first on the city, then on the sea sun, and on the unkindness of fellow students and some teachers. Physical and cultural upsets.

The sanatorium opened in 1901 and closed with the advent of antibiotics. Here is a photo of what stands in its place. One can get there, as I did, by train to Bury St Edmonds. The website of the Nayland Wissington Conservation Society has excellent photos of how the sanatorium looked at the time, and an explanation of what happened to it once antibiotics came along.

Amazingly, Carr did not give up, and was off to France as soon as she’d saved up the money (1910-1911). She did fail in health again, she did have to be hospitalized, she and her sister did go to a spa in Sweden. As in England, she thrived in the countryside, but not in the city of Paris. Of this time she concluded: “I came home from France stronger in body, in thinking, and in work than I had returned from England. My seeing had broadened.” (Growing Pains, p. 305)

In her autobiography, Growing Pains, Carr was more frank about her illness at the sanatorium, and her later heart health issues. It was her dodgy heart that turned her from painting to writing, and she dedicated herself to that with the same passion she’d given to painting. At the age of 70, she is recommended hospital rest; the doctor says “Overdoing has enraged your heart.” [Yes, enraged, not enlarged.] (p. 356) The doctor gives her permission to write (p. 359); in hospital she begins the stories of Klee Wyck. Thanks to her failing heart, therefore, we are able to enjoy Klee Wyck, The House of All Sorts, The Book of Small, and of course Growing Pains, among others.

Further

• Pause: A Sketch Book. Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1953.
• Emily Carr, Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1946, foreword by Ira Dilworth.
• Emily Carr, Hundreds and Thousands: the Journals of Emily Carr. Toronto, Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1966.
• Maria Tippett, Emily Carr: A biography. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1979.
• Kathryn Bridge, Emily Carr in England, Royal BC Museum, Victoria Canada, 2014.
• Emily Carr in The Canadian Encyclopedia.
• Emily Carr’s Heritage Minute.
• Dr Jane Walker and Her Hospital by Anna and Michael Smith. The Lavenham Press, Lavenham, Suffolk [1988].
• Emily in England
• Emily in Dulwich
• Carr Pilgrim