Waiting for the Woods : THE EMILY CARR OMNIBUS, <i> Introduction by Doris Shadbolt (University of Washington Press: $40, cloth; 900 pp.; one photograph)</i>

Emily Carr (1871-1945), Canadian painter and writer, was that most beloved and mythologized American type: a frontier character. Pioneer artist, harbinger of the advanced American style not yet called Abstract Expressionism in her time, she was also a mighty grouch, given to sulks and breakdowns and, by contrast, to fits of coy girlishness and pantheistic enthusiasm. She lives on, the compleat if problematical feminist model, in the delectable self-portraits that pepper the pages of this collection.

Three of these book-length sections were published in her lifetime, foundation for a slowly growing reputation. First to see print, in 1941, was Klee Wyck, a collection of moody stories recalling Garr’s youthful rambles among the Indian villages of the Northwest seacoast, sketch pad at hand and memory at its freshest (the title means “laughing one,” her name in tribal language). It came out when she was 70, just starting to enjoy a bit of acclaim. Three more collections and “Hundreds and Thousands: The Journals of an Artist appear here for the first time, assembled after her death. These include memoirs of her childhood and her later, painful learning days in the art capitals of London and Paris. There are crotchety tales of the birds and animals whose company she preferred to humans--a vulture, a crow and a peacock, multiple sheepdogs, a rat and a monkey named Woo. And finally there are moving passages of self-analysis and aesthetic questioning recalling summers when she camped in a falling-down van called “the Elephant,” painting, trying to paint, failing to paint and painting again the obsessive theme of her middle years, “the deep sacred beauty of Canada’s still woods.”

Carr was born in 1871 in the nostalgia-infected British colonial outpost of Victoria on Vancouver Island, then a “little town drowned in silent loneliness.” Her father, the archetypal Scot-Presbyterian patriarch, was a purveyor of English foodstuffs and foreign cigars to a clientele some of whom lived in log cabins. Out of homesickness, he planted cowslips and primroses around the edges of his cowpasture and trimmed his hedgerows straight. Emily, his youngest, was his “pet.” A current feminist notion repeated in Doris Shadbolt’s sympathetic introduction is that Emily suffered at his hands and grew to despise him. However, no such flat declaration is made in these pages. Instead, Carr vents whatever retrospective anger she preserved in a few stabs of ironic description of a proud old man in conflict with a proud old man in conflict with a willful daughter. Indeed, in her own old age Carr wrote she had become “like Father . . . Father’s straightness.” Much more to the point, and well to remember, she knows he recognized her talent for art and kept, all his life, her drawing of a dog in a childish hand.

In any case, both parents died early leaving Emily in the care of a truly disciplinarian older sister. At 16, she fled by ship to San Francisco and enrolled herself in art school, setting a course for her future. When, a few years later, she trekked the remote coasts and islands of British Columbia, she forged her own kind of emphatic bond with the near-forgotten, decaying artifacts of Northwest tribal culture. Her special interest became the totem poles she would draw and paint for years, with gradually refining skill. These somber scenes, filled even with a kind of supernatural gloom, stayed in her mind’s eye and provide the mood of Klee Wyck.

Still, Carr would have remained a mere recorder of ethnological curiosities had she not set out to enlarge her artistic vocabulary in Europe. This time, however, the obstruction she met was internal. On the threshold of so many new possibilities for radical action and thinking, she broke down twice, and though in her convalesences she was able to take in the basic principles of Post-Impressionist and pre-Modernist art, she returned as she had gone, essentially a provincial loner. Discouraged, embittered, full of self-pity and rancor toward others, she gave up painting for some 15 years and was only, one might say, salvaged by luck. By the late 1920s, the interest of mainstream Western culture had drifted in her direction. Museums became interested in “primitive” cultures; her “Indian” paintings were mentioned in the East, summoned there for exhibition, and soon, powerful men with connections to the art and media worlds came calling.

The turning point in her life was meeting a group of progressive Toronto landscapists who helped her refocus her painting energies on her “relationship to the Infinite.” That concept dear to 19th-Century transcendentalism would, in a complex process of cultural mutation, infuse the early Modernist movement. Of that period of tremulous liberation, Carr would write--in words that almost literally echo and foreshadow those of Georgia O’Keeffe and Joan Mitchell--”I went no more to the far villages, but to the deep quiet woods near home where I sat staring, staring, staring--half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born. Slowly, slowly I began to put feeble scratchings and smudges of paint onto my paper, returning home disheartened, wondering, waiting for the woods to say something to me personally. . . .”

By the time Carr died in 1945, she was considered Canada’s most famous painter--of female gender. But her work is still practically unknown in the United States. It has not had a significant showing in a state-side gallery or museum (one canvas was included in a show of Expressionist Landscapes at the IBM Gallery in New York in 1988). Paula Blanchard’s engrossing biography, which came out that same year, contained only a few reproductions and the book at hand has none, even though Shadbolt is the author also of a study of her art.

Finally, it has to be said the present volume is far from user-friendly. It is sadly unannotated, lacks introductions to the separate texts, and, irritatingly, has neither an index nor a master list of titles to guide a reader between notebook references and relevant stories. Perhaps a next edition will provide these.