I am highly suspicious of well-documented biographies, just as I am skeptical about historical records and events. If, on the other hand, the biographer would write about his subject purely from his imagination, from what he thinks his subject was or is, that is another matter.
— Henry Miller, letter to Jay Martin,
quoted in Martin’s Always Merry and Bright
Barrie Nichol records this Henry Miller passage in 1979 in his “Houses of the Alphabet” notebook. It’s one of many moments in his notebooks that display his concern both with the genre of biography and with the question of how he will be remembered. The earliest such moment occurs in his very first notebook, in which, on July 15, 1965, after looking back over its contents, he worried that they might be mostly “shit” and, from the viewpoint of a future “theoretical” biographer, worthless. Barrie was then only 21 years old, virtually unpublished, and already anticipating being memorialized in a book such as the present one. A decade later he would chuckle whenever he or someone else mentioned British novelist B.S. Johnson’s Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs, but would continue recording his thoughts, dreams, ideas for novels, poems or drawings, and conversations with his parents in his notebooks anyway.
The present “theoretical biographer” met Barrie Nichol in Toronto in late 1970 — toward the end of the half-decade in which Barrie met most of his important friends and collaborators. I knew him then as “bpNichol,” a young visual poet. We had argued in the pages of my journal Open Letter some years earlier — 1966 — over whether I ought to view visual poetry as “relevant to what I understand as poetry.” We’d differed somewhat vigorously — causing Victor Coleman to quip in a letter to the journal that Frank was sure that people were saying “ugh and the like” before they could draw, and that bpNichol was defending visual poetry “like the civil servant will defend his job.”1 Four years later I was newly in Toronto and writing a small book about Earle Birney, who had created a number of visual poems. Even if I didn’t want to create such things, I needed to understand them. bpNichol, with whom I had not been in contact since 1966, was now the author of the box of visual poems Still Water and anthologist of another boxful, The Cosmic Chef: An Evening of Concrete, as well as the creator of the more conventionally confessional booklet “Journeying and the Returns” — itself part of yet another box of stuff, ambiguously labelled bp. I phoned bp — or more likely Barrie — and asked for help, and he suggested we have lunch in a little box of a Hungarian restaurant on Bloor Street near Spadina.
Lunch went on for quite a while: by 1972 he was the most active contributing editor of Open Letter, by 1976 we were together as the two most active editors of Coach House Press, and by 1977 I was writing books like Edward and Patricia in the midst of “artists’ marathons” that Barrie was conducting at the lay psychoanalytical foundation Therafields, of which he was vice-president. Lunch had stretched to include numerous pots of Earl Grey in my living room, numerous lobsters at the biannual Coach House wayzgoose, and numerous mugs of honey-sweetened coffee and “Lisa bread” in the Therafields barn in Mono Township. I saw Barrie in most of his various circles — Coach House, the Four Horsemen sound poetry group, the international sound poets,2 the “’pataphysicians,”3 his writing classes at York University, and Therafields. He was still the one of many names — Barrie, bp, beep, beeper, beepers, bar, Bear, Professor Nichol. My son Mike, who much preferred the sciences to the arts, came to admire and trust Barrie/bp so much that in May 1988 he enrolled in what was probably Barrie’s last high school sound poetry workshop. Unlike Boswell, I was not taking notes in any of these places, or planning to need such.
It was Barrie who was the more preoccupied with biography — or for him both autobiography and much of its larger context, origin. Throughout his life he would search for forms that might be appropriate for telling his “story” — creating numerous quasi-autobiographical texts, from the published Captain Poetry Poems, “Journeying and the Returns,” Monotones, The Other Side of the Room, The Martyrology, Two Novels, The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid (which he once considered part of his ongoing semi-autobiographical “The Plunkett Papers”), Journal, and Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography to the unpublished and unfinished “The Life and Search of Jonathan Quest” (begun 1964), “The Plunkett Papers” (begun 1969), “An Autobiography” (begun 1972), “The Autobiography of Phillip Workman by bpNichol” (begun 1972), “John Cannyside” (begun 1968), “John Cannyside an Epic Poem” (begun 1972), “bpNichol by John Cannyside” (drafted 1974–86), “Organ Music” (drafted 1980–88), and “Desiring to Become” (planned 1979–88), an autobiographical text probably to be based on family photographs that he asked his mother to gather for him in March 1979.4 Sometimes he told his stories in the first person, as in “Journeying and the Returns” and Selected Organs, sometimes in the third, as in “The Autobiography of Phillip Workman,” where he gave his persona his own middle name and his mother’s maiden name. Sometimes he gave himself a metaphoric persona, like Billy the Kid, the kid who thought his “dick” was not only short but also “short for richard” like bp was now short for Barrie Phillip. Sometimes, as in “For Jesus Lunatick” in Two Novels, he blurred persons and narrative lines together in dream landscapes that echoed the confusions caused by psychological “transference” — again using his middle name Phillip for the main character. In the various drafts of “bpNichol by John Cannyside” he used the conventions of postmodern metafiction to create a work in which “bpNichol” was merely a fictionalizable character that he and several other rival characters could competitively vie to define. In The Martyrology he would send “bpNichol” to pun and wordgame multiple paths through language in search of more biography of Barrie Nichol — letting bp occupy the first-person “i” and leaving to Barrie the ambiguous “you.”
In nearly all of Barrie’s 34 notebooks one can find evidence of preoccupation with the several questions of autobiography: origin, or how did I come to be; shaping events, or how did I become what I am; and identity, or who am I anyway; and with how to find the appropriate forms in which to address these. In his first notebook, as he set out to begin a new life in Toronto, he wrote the startling announcement that he wanted to write a novel that would take him all of his lifetime and would finish only with his death — adding that all authors — Kerouac, Lowry, Kafka, Burroughs — write autobiographically even when they change the names of the personages. How could one write about anything else? he wondered. Then he added the even more startling comment that he didn’t even want to write a novel, that all he wanted to create was a huge image of his life stuffed into a book (entry April 1, 1964). Change “novel” or “book” in this passage to “epic poem” and one has precisely what Barrie will have done by his death in 1988.
In May 1972 while drafting for a second time that year parts of “An Autobiography,” he wrote to himself in his “Notebook IV” (which was actually the eighth notebook of various sizes that he had begun and preserved by this date) that the biggest irony of autobiography was that the writer could never write his own story completely, that he was inevitably destined to die with the project uncompleted. In this note he moved back and forth between referring to his “i”-narrator in the first person and in the third; “i” would die before its life was narrated, he wrote, although “we,” he suggested, could relate what it could not. “i” here was simultaneously both Barrie Nichol and a fiction, with the quick shifts of the pronouns also suggesting that the “i” that he was experiencing as his own mind might also be a kind of fiction.
Again, his prescience was, and is, unsettling — not only about his leaving his story uncompleted but also about how others — his “we” — could continue to tell it. At this point he knew, as a now self-consciously inventive writer, both that his subjectivities, his “i’s,” were multiple and fictional, and that their stories were still, whatever their multipleness, part of his own personal “i” story. He knew that because “i” was destined to die, any fictional third-person “i” that “i” created would die also — but that inversely only the death of his various subjectivities could satisfactorily “finish” his and their stories. He also wrote here, however, about how interchangeable these subjectivities could be, how the “phillip” he was calling himself in “An Autobiography” was also he whose middle name is Phillip — Barrie Phillip Nichol. He was calling himself phillip, he wrote, while not being phillip although phillip was still a part of his own name. Thus he was who he was not, he wrote, even though he was as he was saying he was — i.e. both “phillip” and not “phillip.” Then he crossed out this impressively convoluted passage and many lines around it, possibly because they had crossed for him a limit of metafictional “undecidability,” or perhaps because he worried that overall they had become tiresomely clever (“Notebook IV” 6).
In his “Notebook Begun February 21, 1974” (the 15th surviving one overall) — started when he had become adept at half-concealing autobiographical material beneath such formal, metafictional play, at playing a kind of identity peekaboo with his readers — he wrote to himself that he was realizing that the proportion of autobiography in his current draft of his novel, Journal, was even greater than he had earlier thought. He told himself that this had happened because long ago, when he was an elementary schoolchild, he had embraced writing as a substitute for the mother he could not satisfyingly embrace in person. He had shifted all his longing into his writing and away from her, he wrote, and thus was creating in Journal an imaginary woman whom he could envision himself touching and caressing — someone who was in his Oedipally possessed imagination a “good” mother. In a nearby entry he observed that Journal now contained a significant number of revised parts that he had originally written for the manuscript titled “An Autobiography.”
On a visit to his sister Deanna in 1979 Barrie recorded that she told him that he wrote in order to communicate with their father, because to him books were more important than other things — including, evidently, relations with people. She had joked that it was hard to get their father to put a book down in order to do things with him (entry February 25, 1979). It is on this notebook page that Barrie conceived of his never-written autobiography “Desiring to Become.” Earlier in a short note to himself in his “4th Short Notebook Begun April 15, 1975” (the 20th notebook, and the second that he has titled the “4th Short”5), he had written that it felt as if no one, including his mother and Deanna, had ever wanted to listen to what he had to say. And consequently, he concluded, he had begun exploring “forms” — always looking for better and more effective ways to articulate.
Barrie had understood very early, it seems, that autobiography both is and isn’t autobiography, that it is at best a plausible invention, a fiction that makes sense of memories that are themselves at best plausible interpretations of events a person has experienced or witnessed or believed themselves to have witnessed, or that create substitute versions of disappointing past experiences. We are all autobiographers, in the sense that our lives require us to construct a sense of “self,” an understanding of who we are, how we came to be so, who we were and are in what contexts and what relationships,6 and who we might be able to become — an answer to a question that both a fiction writer or a psychoanalyst might ask: “Who do you think you are?” Barrie appears to have begun writing fantasy versions of an autobiography in childhood. In adulthood, looking for that best way to express things, he wrote various versions of his life in other genres — the joke (The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid), the comic book (The Captain Poetry Poems), the lyric (The Other Side of the Room), the epic poem (The Martyrology), the nouveau roman (Two Novels, Journal), the postmodern detective novel (“John Cannyside”), simultaneously trying both to communicate his life story and to disguise it as illusion, fantasy, “art.” He was recurrently conscious of this creative split. In that 1979 note about “Desiring to Become” he theorized that he perhaps wrote voluminously both to communicate his story to his father and to protect it from his mother who, when he was 10, had — traumatically for him — thrown out the manuscript of his first work of fiction. He reflected that this double sense of purpose — to write things that his mother couldn’t destroy and that his father might be interested in reading — might also have given him an idiosyncratic understanding of the form/content dichotomy, and be now causing his early life to be reflected in both the content of his writing and its often rushed-to-publication form. Multiple copies are much less easy for a mother to destroy than a single copy, and much easier for a father to discover. “AutobIography” is not a fiction and yet is constructed, and edited, he had scribbled in 1975 on a slip of International Hotel of Calgary notepaper, after quoting Rimbaud’s “je est un autre.” He was about to tell a University of Calgary class that the “je” they were listening to was often “un autre,” even to himself.7
Biography can be also no more than a plausible construction — a hypothetical story that interprets an incomplete set of data, memories, perspectives, and facts. In undertaking this one Frank Davey becomes not only another part of bpNichol’s much envisioned “we” that he expected might continue to tell what his “i,” once dead, could never tell, but also another biography-competitor, along with John Cannyside, Phillip Workman, bpNichol, whatever Nichol biographers volunteer later, and the various Barrie Nichol friends and relatives, including Ellie Nichol, who have developed their own differing understandings of who Barrie was and who he saw others — such as his mother — as being. Some of these, particularly among his poetry and psychotherapy colleagues, may think that I have misconstrued the relationship between his neo-Freudian understandings and his poetry — possibly worrying that any such connection could render the poetry abreactive, less creative, or merely autobiographical. Others may think that I have done violence to some of his writing, not so much by reading it as merely autobiographical — which I hope I have not done — as by repeatedly reading it for autobiography — which I believe was one of the readings Barrie Nichol both desired and feared. At least from his father. “Barrie Nichol,” that is. “Go for it,” he used to tell me.