. . . all writing, by the very act of writing, transforms the “I” into an Other.
— Stephen Scobie,
bpNichol: What History Teaches, 125
The Nichols had lived in Port Arthur,1 the Canadian National Railway’s major transfer site for the shipment of grain, in 1939–40, and Avis had not liked it. Possibly she found its mountain and lake geography confining, Deanna speculates, after having spent all of her life in Saskatchewan. She also had found her inability to drive more confining there than it had been in Vancouver or Winnipeg, and so was especially unhappy to be leaving her still new house at Wildwood Park. Moreover Glen had resolved never again to own a house, having being transferred out of his Rupert Street one after a year and a half of ownership and out of Wildwood after four years, four months of which had been lost to the flood. Avis passed on her dismay to Barrie and Deanna, who attempted to glare an “evil eye” at their real estate agent each time he drove into H section, in hope that they could stop the house from being sold. Both children liked their new room arrangements and were wary about losing them.
Eight-year-old Barrie and 12-year-old Deanna had recently also begun going to Saturday afternoon movies together, mostly musical comedies, and begun reading screen magazines and writing to movie stars. Often they would receive replies, although they suspected most of these were signed by secretaries. Barrie was especially fond of Jane Powell, Howard Keel, Rex Allen, Ginger Rogers, and Fred Astaire, and had begun collecting photos of the various screen “couples” that they formed. They worried about not being close to a theatre in their new home.
By late June the house in H section had been sold, and the family was on its way to an older one-and-one-half storey wooden house at 441 Marks Street in Port Arthur. Barrie again shared a room with Don, who entered Grade 11 in Port Arthur, successfully resisting school board attempts to promote him to Grade 12 because of the somewhat more advanced Manitoba school curriculum (11 grades plus senior matriculation). An accomplished draftsman and cartoonist, Don began producing clever cartoons for his new school’s newspaper and yearbook. His work was popular with the other students. Created with a pen and India ink, his images were dense, complex, and usually satiric. They quickly caught the envious eye of his younger brother, and led Barrie to attempt his own structurally simpler drawings. But Don’s, he was sure, were much better. With Don’s help he created a Dick Tracy movie-in-a-box, assembling Tracy strips together on rollers, which they had mounted in a cardboard box so that the images could pass across the open side.
Dick Tracy had been becoming an increasingly important part of Barrie’s fantasy life. He briefly recalled this part of his childhood to Irene Niechoda in a 1987 interview when she asked him about “The Dark Walker” reference in The Martyrology, Book I, and in doing so indirectly confirmed how literally autobiographical much of his unpublished “An Autobiography” and “The Autobiography of Phillip Workman” probably are.
As I write this note what suddenly strikes me is the THE DARK WALKER was in every sense Dick Tracy who i used to imagine walking the streets of Port Arthur with me when i was a kid. It is difficult to chart the effect that Chester Gould’s [the creator of the Dick Tracy strip] stark characterizations had on my consciousness. There was an immediate impression: cold, distance, & underlying violence imprinting itself in my mind. Tracy, Catchem & Pat Patton were so much a part of my life that it became difficult at times to separate myself from them.
He went on to repeat to her the “Autobiography of Phillip Workman” passage in which Phillip (or Barrie, or Barrie Phillip) first encountered Tracy, in a strip in which he was rescuing the young Junior.
And a lot of his stories focus around kids; that’s an ongoing motif that he’s always dealing with. I used to really identify with him. In fact, I still remember the first strip of his I ever saw, which had to do with a kid who was lost in the sewers, among the pipes, with a dog. I actually found it. It was a 1949, I think, comic strip. (Niechoda 1992 98–99)
He described his Port Arthur nighttime Tracy fantasies in more detail, and with much more emotion, in his “Notebook IV” (begun May 1, 1972) drafts of “An Autobiography.” He described them as being dreams of not dreaming, dreams of having a substantial and meaningful life, and from which he would wake in confusion, not sure what world he was in. He was embracing the imagination “too strongly,” he wrote. He would lie awake in his room waiting to hear Tracy’s footsteps in the street below his window, then see him stop to light a cigarette — despite never having seen him smoke in the comics pages. He would hear Tracy speak to him. Barrie would climb through his window and down the side of his house so he could walk beside Tracy and talk. Then he abruptly broke his narrative — announcing that all this was a lie — not the fantasy itself but the things fantasized, the climbing from the window and walking the nighttime streets of Port Arthur. He lamented what he’d had to do, lamented having had to let the fantasy “devour” him. He wrote of how odd it was that someone so wary of being engulfed in another person’s fantasies — presumably a reference to his mother — should have submerged himself so dangerously in ones of his own making.
Despite his seemingly productive activities with Don, in this 1972 retrospective Barrie portrayed himself as having withdrawn from conscious engagement with everyday life into an ongoing comic strip narrative. It was once again a retrospective addressed to his mother, and again one that by addressing her implicated her — in attempting to escape her fantasies, he suggested, he had trapped himself in his own. He went on to describe his immersion in the Tracy fantasy as a kind of psychic suicide, an attraction not to the contradictory romance of complete annihilation, he suggested, but to an imitation self-annihilation, an annihilation of consciousness. It was both a self-betrayal and a betrayal of the “we” to which a social person is obligated to contribute. Years later in The Martyrology he would translate Dick Tracy, Junior, Catchem, Blossom Tight, and his other fantasy figures into “saints,” but toward the end of Book II say much the same thing about the horror of his self-committment to them:
fuck you all saints
dream world of half remembered death
i loved you all
it nearly killed me
there is another world i’ve lived in all my life
took my own mind for a wife when just a kid
& hid there
What is especially notable about Barrie’s various attempts to write these narratives of his early life is the extent to which these were narratives of fantasy — actual fantasy — rather than narratives of actual events. The impression he gave here of his life after 1953 was of a zombie state in which he often participated in school and home events without noticing that he was participating, or without investing any emotion in his participation. He wrote of having experienced extreme anger — he was not specific about this — and of then having turned inward, of having “split” himself in order to invent a new “we” of himself and Dick Tracy, and of how this split problematically cut him off from humanity, isolated him in a personal world.
However, in either the fall of 1953 or spring of 1954 events occurred that over the next decade would offer him a way out of the dream. Near to his school he fell into a ditch — one he believed he could have drowned in. After he was extricated by the fire department, he came home so cold and dripping wet that he was severely ill for a week or more after. He may have partly hidden the cause of his coming home soaked; Deanna remembers only hearing of him have gone “into a ditch, getting stuck there.” Trying to analyze a dream he had just had on March 18, 1975, Barrie described the incident in a notebook (“Notebook Begun February 21, 1974”), writing that he had been 10 years old and had stumbled into a ditch, that he had known how close to disaster he was and didn’t care one way or the other. But after being rescued he had started writing — which, he pointed out sardonically, was one way of dealing with things.
His recollection that he hadn’t cared about his plight echoes his thoughts about being tempted not to live when he was an infant. At the time of the ditch incident he was more likely nine years of age rather than ten, for Deanna associates the incident specifically with his being in Grade 4. “He got a bad chill, he was at home sick after that, recovering, and that was when he started writing his stories, lying in bed and printing them into scribblers. And his teacher apparently read them out, like a serial . . . that you’d see in the newspaper. And he always kind of thinks that might be where he got his idea to be writer.”
Of the newly written stories the first and most important to Barrie was called “The Sailor from Mars.” At the end of the school year he brought the manuscript home, inadvertently triggering the second crucial event of his Port Arthur period — in a year or two his mother absent-mindedly gathered it up with other items she thought disposable and threw it out with the weekly trash. Although he did not complain, Barrie was devastated, and began to imagine the story’s destruction as a kind of death and rebirth — the death of a singular “Barrie” and a strategic rebirth as multiple — multiple stories, multiple copies, multiple versions of the same stories, multiple Barries all embedded in the stories and actions of others. On May 1, 1972, he recorded the moment in a notebook section of “An Autobiography” as part of an impossible autobiography, writing that the moment his mother had thrown out the story was also the moment that autobiography had died, and that “i” had died and “we” had come into being as both a replacement and a completion of the dying “i.” While his writing had marked a return to participation in collective humanity, the loss of the manuscript also showed how only the social could have provided for its survival — his mother, the family, the bookstore, the library. Independence is an illusion, he wrote. And thus so too is autobiography. This is likely why he soon renamed “An Autobiography” “The Autobiography of Phillip Workman by bpNichol” — because bpNichol understood the impossibility of autobiography while the earlier version of bp, “Phillip Workman,” had not. Paradoxically, it now required a “we” to create an autobiography.
On May 15, 1972, he marked this passage, and possibly all of the “An Autobiography” writings, as “Part III of Book III of The Martyrology,” a plan that he did not carry out in the published book. The only hint of it in Book 3 occurs in Part V, in lines that echo the illusionality of “i” which the above passage had asserted.
i am afraid of writing something which does not end
as we does not
only the link which is i
to be replaced
other i’s to see it thru
‘in the true time & space called meaning’
This passage forecast the relief he would feel each time he believed The Martyrology had ended. However, The Martyrology was to be a text in which Barrie Nichol’s personal stories were indeed embedded in the stories of others, from those of Gilgamesh to those of his ancestors and Toronto friends, and in which Barrie himself appears in different versions of “we” as his contexts and relationships change.2
Overall, the incidents inscribed in this draft of “An Autobiography” created yet another mythic scene of origin — the start of Barrie Nichol transferring his unrewarded passions for his mother to writing, to the “we” of those collective creations the alphabet and language, thus linking his passions to ones that he would later associate with another ambiguous and linguistically rooted autobiographer, Gertrude Stein.3 He would come to call Stein, in her own words, “the mother of us all,” his emphasis being at least partly on the “us” — as well as on finding a substitute mother who did not throw away manuscripts. This mothering “Gertrude Stein” would be as much a metaphor as a person — a metaphor for the materiality of language Barrie had embraced and which Stein’s writings had foregrounded. In 1969 he would tell his new-mother story in yet another metaphor in his six-part CBC “Ideas” radio serial “Little Boy Lost Meets Mother Tongue.”
In the 1980s he wrote a third version of the ditch incident as part of the prose poem “The Hips” for Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography.
It was because of my hips I started writing. I was in Grade 4. It was late fall or early spring. I can’t remember which, but I remember the ditch, the one near the school, and it was full of icy slush and a friend dared me to jump across it and so I did. [. . .] I landed like some bad imitation of a ballet dancer, struck, my left leg burying itself in that slush right up to my hip, stuck, my right leg floating on the top. My hips kept me afloat. Or at least that’s what the firemen said to my Maw when they brought me home after rescuing me. [. . .] [T]he firemen said that that ditch was so deep and the sludge so like quicksand I would’ve drowned if it hadn’t been for the strange position of my legs and hips. And the cold I caught from being stuck in the ditch turned into bronchitis and they kept me home from school for over two weeks and during that time I wrote my first novel, The Sailor From Mars, all 26 chapters written by hand in a school copy book. (39–40)
He went on to recount that “my Maw threw it away by mistake three years later” and that when he returned to school “I showed it to my teacher and she read the whole thing to the class, a bit every morning for a week or two, just like a real serial. [. . .] I was alive and now I was a writer too” (40).
Although Barrie wrote here about his mother’s discarding of the manuscript as if it had no impact on him, this was not necessarily the case. He would later come to believe that while his subconscious motivation to write had been to create worlds and mythologies more satisfying than those he was obliged to live among, his motivation to become a publisher and self-publisher, and to write the same story in several different “forms” or genres, had been to increase the odds of being listened to or read, to give his writings greater social materiality, greater “we”-ness. No one, not even his mother or sister, seemed to want to hear what he had to say, he would write in his “Autographs Mickey 4th Short N(te)book” in April 1975.
Barrie’s preoccupying fantasies would gradually expand past Dick Tracy, Junior, Sam Catchem, Sparkle Plenty, and sailors from Mars to include the imaginary and actual heroes he was seeing with his sister at the movie theatres. “Rex Allen, Lash LaRue, Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, & Ghost Rider” are the ones he listed in his draft essay “Comics as Myth: Notes on Method in The Martyrology” as the ones that had also fascinated him in 1954 (untitled September 1968 notebook, and Peters 78). Moreover, certain graphic real-life events would occasionally — but very selectively — lodge in his memory, such as ones from a train journey he took in 1954 with his father and Deanna. However, her 2011 recollection of that trip makes a revealing contrast with Barrie’s 1969 narrative about it, which he drafted to be part of “The Plunkett Papers.” Deanna recalls:
One time my dad was taking Barrie and I to Calgary — I can’t remember why Mom wasn’t going — but it was Barrie and I and my dad on the train from Port Arthur. And it was a branch line, and then you had to transfer to the main line once you got to Winnipeg. And so we stopped in Atikokin because there’d been a derailment ahead on the track. We ended up having to stay overnight in Atikokin. Mom had given us some candy, and we’d spilled the candy all over the floor, and my dad was embarrassed, and my dad [had us] in the smoker. You know there used to be this smoker on the trains, because he was a smoker back then, and he was snoring, and we were embarrassed. There was all this stuff went on, and then we pulled out of Atikokin in the morning and there were men still working on the tracks, and our train hit a couple of these men, and killed them, and I had blocked that completely out of my mind until years later when Barrie said to me “Remember that time when our train hit those men on the track and killed them and their bodies were lying there beside the track,” and it came back to me in a flash. [. . .] Then we got to Winnipeg and my dad put us up in the McLaren Hotel or something, near the train station, it was a pretty seedy area, and I remember Barrie and I sitting up in the window of the hotel watching for my dad to come back — we were scared stiff. We thought that everybody that walked past looked suspicious. How old were we? — maybe 14 and 10 I suppose. I guess my dad had gone to meet his buddies. And then we got back on the train and went to Calgary. (Interview, February 5, 2011)
Barrie’s passage of poetry reads:
we rode the train back west in 54
my dad sister & me
outside of red rock had to stop 12 hours
coz of a slide
ran over 2 workers
just after getting under way again
. . . .
heading out to plunkett from port arthur
the summer before i turned ten
meeting uncle bill in saskatoon
drove down to my uncle mike’s farm
running over this prairie chicken on the way
. . . .
& later
my sister & me
walked down the road from hun & mike’s farm
just the two of us
death all around us
determined to make it
on that last mile to plunkett
(“The Plunkett Papers,” An H in the Heart 39)
In Deanna’s narrative it is the accidents and the deaths she has forgotten. In Barrie’s the most surprising absence in his notebook draft is his father, whom Deanna constructs as the major character. In fact in Barrie’s poem it’s almost only the deaths of the men and the prairie chickens that are recalled. His father’s presence, the overnight wait in Atikokin in the smoking car, their father’s embarrassment, the puzzling fact that their mother is not with them, the need to transfer in Winnipeg, the frighteningly seedy McLaren hotel — he has apparently experienced without closely noting. Plunkett — the town he may be already in 1954 creating family mythology around — is for him the destination, while for Deanna it is a forgettable stop along the way to Calgary.
Barrie’s unrequited infatuation with his mother also appears to have continued in Port Arthur and to contribute not only perhaps to his “forgetting” of his father in the train accident poem but also to the dance and dress scenes on the final pages of Journal. Barrie drafted those scenes originally in an undated notebook, seemingly from the early 1970s, as parts of that “An Autobiography of Phillip Workman by bpNichol.” Whether these drafts were themselves fantasies or descriptions of innocent scenes that actually occurred at 441 Marks Street is not clear, although Deanna remembers her mother being avid about dancing and recalls that she and Glen went regularly to dances at the Port Arthur Country Club where they were members — much as they had gone to dances Friday and Saturday nights at the Charleswood and Wildwood clubs in south Winnipeg. Whatever their factual ground, the emotions of these passages were what Barrie was carrying with him — in the 1950s as in the early 1970s — in his relations with his mother and father and with his female and male friends.
It was you you taught me everything do you remember youd dress up in your long gown with the purple sash your hair tied back with a ribbon & youd take my hand telling me to dance & we’d dance mommy the two of us would dance all around the room and i was no higher than your waist my arms held up to where youd take my hands & lead me you would never hold me close you held your arms out holding me away holding me still in the dancing leading in the careful three step three step you were lovely mommy i wanted to hold you close to me like i’d seen it done the way men held women & we’d dance you smiling at me repeating one two three one two three & never held me oh i get sick of blaming im not blaming you mommy its all over now isn’t it that time is gone forever the music stopped that was never playing we made it up the tunes i mean as we danced me humming the songs i’d learned from the radio you marking the time i am still dancing mother. . . .
[. . .]
you would let me help you when you dressed you would ask me saying please zip me up & I felt the skin on your back moist and pale white . . . my fingers tugged the zipper up closing you in in your whiteness my fingers seeming ugly i would stare at them for hours wishing them longer imagining them travelling over the surface of your skin . . .
(Journal 69–71)
Read with minor alterations in a novel titled Journal, these passages read much differently from how they do in a draft manuscript titled “An Autobiography of Phillip Workman by bpNichol.” The more lurid and hallucinatory passages of Oedipal desire in Journal also had their origin in these notebook drafts of “autobiography” and offer even stronger hints of why Barrie’s teenage years would be so tumultuous, and of why — despite outward cheerfulness — he would come to be struggling against thoughts of suicide in 1965. When he later wrote in The Martyrology, Books 3 & 4 that without the help of his Toronto psychotherapist Lea “quite literally / none of it would have been written,” the “quite literally” likely carried much more information than most readers — including myself — could recognize.4