'The Forest Lover': Artist gets overdue attention, but much truth is sacrificed

Artists' lives rendered in film and fiction have had a recent vogue: the excellent movies "Pollock" and "Frida"; Tracy Chevalier's new novel, "The Lady and the Unicorn," as well as her earlier "Girl with a Pearl Earring," now popular in both media; and Susan Vreeland's previous best sellers, "The Passion of Artemisia" and "Girl in Hyacinth Blue." But perhaps enough is getting to be enough, particularly since Vreeland's fourth book plays fast and loose with a well-documented life.

In the afterword to "The Forest Lover, this time focusing on the pioneering British Columbia painter Emily Carr (1871-1945), Vreeland says she has taken "certain liberties for the sake of the narrative," that the chronology "is approximated to fit the needs of pacing."

Her remarks are immediately troubling. Why make things up? Why change when events occurred? What portions can readers trust? How odd in a case of adapting a life to literature that the publisher's note still claims "any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead ... is entirely coincidental."

"The Forest Lover" is not intended as biography, nor is it fully imagined fiction, but an odd blend that doesn't do justice to either genre. For a love interest, Vreeland notes she "invented" Claude du Bois with "no evidence." She suggests Carr's father molested her verbally and physically. Did he? Jessica Howard, portrayed as real friend but unconvincingly shrill cheerleader, "represents friendships Emily surely had." An actual painter, Frances Hodgkins, with whom Vreeland's protagonist has a suggestively romantic summer of painting in France, "does not appear in Carr's journals," yet a trip by Carr to Sweden to recuperate from stress and study in Paris is entirely absent from the novel.

Real people such as Carr's Squamish friend Sophie Frank, Carr's sisters, teachers in France, Canadian art collectors and museum officials do appear. Yet some of Vreeland's choices to devote many pages to Carr's attachment to Harold Cook, a victim of child abuse about whom little is known, are disappointing.

I'm committing the sin of wishing for things to be in the book that the writer chose to omit or downplay. That Carr loved to write and published many books, for example. That she had connections to Mark Tobey, whom she invited to teach at her studio. That she met Georgia O'Keeffe. That she formed rewarding friendships with profoundly influential painters such as Lawren Harris and the Group of Seven. That despite financial struggles, she was known for a wonderful sense of humor.

Throughout, Vreeland's chronology is maddeningly vague. Her transitions in time and place are sometimes abrupt and confusing. The whole story suddenly stops just as Carr is poised to enjoy success. Apparently, struggle is the focus, yet with few exceptions — occasional rain, ravenous mosquitoes, a rough ride in a boat or wagon — the tribulations of early 20th-century travel to the wilds of back-country British Columbia are told in bland narrative summary. The prose stumbles: "When the canoe touched the shore, it flew off with a loud grak"; the "it" that flew isn't the boat, but a heron in another sentence. Difficulties with pronouns, grammatical errors ("like you said"), and pathetic fallacies ("agitated puff," "anxious eyes"), undermine the writing throughout.

Early reviews already praise Vreeland, however, for putting Carr, a near-contemporary of two other more famous strong-willed artists, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) and Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), into the public eye. That a woman born in the Victorian era, isolated on Canada's remote west coast, would find a way both to fulfill her will to paint and to document vanishing native cultures does make a fascinating story. I wonder, however, if readers would tolerate so many "liberties" in novels based on O'Keeffe or Kahlo.

It's an immensely intriguing prospect, conjuring a convincing story from a distant reality. Journalists make up "facts" at their peril. When a novelist bases fiction on fact, should similar responsibilities attend her work?