Barrie needs to try harder in language.
— Miss Neitherent,
second-term report card, February 1958
The Nichols’ time in Port Arthur came to an end in the spring of 1957 when Glen was promoted and sent back to Winnipeg. Don had already left the family in 1955 for Toronto where he had begun studying to be an architect. In Winnipeg Glen found there were very few houses for rent, and settled for a small one at 43 Morley Avenue. Avis disliked the house immediately and intensely. Barrie, relegated to a crudely constructed room in the basement, was also unhappy, despite his mother’s attempts to brighten the walls with yellow paint. In less than a year, Glen moved them to the upper two floors of a large old house at 235 Oakwood Avenue where Barrie and Deanna had the entire top floor.
Barrie enrolled in Grade 8 at Churchill Junior High, a school paired with a similarly named senior high school. He completed the year with an 80.4% average and ranked second in his class. His best grades were 92% in social studies and spelling, 88% in literature, and 83% in science. After receiving the first-term comment from his teacher “Barrie is a splendid student,” in the second term he was told “Barrie needs to try harder in language.” His grade had been 57%, which he raised to 74% in the third and final term.
For Grade 9 he moved to the Churchill Senior High where he developed a powerful interest in long distance running and joined the school track team. To his fascination with comic strips and musical comedies, he added a new curiosity about jazz. A letter from one of his classmates shows them by 1960 having developed a mutual interest in the music of Charlie Christian, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Fats Navarro, Wardell Gray, Stan Getz, Lester Young, Charlie Ventura, Sonny Rollins, and numerous lesser known players.
In his various “autobiographies” Barrie makes little mention of this Winnipeg period. One allusion to it occurs in Selected Organs in which he depicts his time of puberty discovery. “On the edge of thirteen when Carol Wisdom’s chest started to develop you couldn’t take your eyes off it” (21).
You didn’t think of the chest as sensitive until you danced with her. You were thirteen & the dance floor was crowded & tho the moving bodies of your friends pressed you together you would only allow your chests to touch & there was heat & pressure & movement between you & your chest was ten times more sensitive than your hands, felt more than your eyes could see, & your trapped heart pounded as if you would die, explode, right there before her eyes. . . . (22)
But it is only by calculating where Barrie would be at this age that one can identify the city.
By and large Winnipeg 1957–60 seems to have been for him an amnesiac period, in which, as he would later write in a May 1972 notebook draft of “An Autobiography,” he had been so deeply enmeshed in his fantasy worlds that everyday life could pass virtually unnoticed. He wrote here of visiting his parents and looking through his childhood photos. He was already gripped by sadness, he noted, that seemed always to arise whenever he was with his family, and was finding himself struggling to choose whether or not to succumb to it. Among the photos was one of his high school’s soccer team. It was a newspaper photo from when the team had won a city championship. In the middle, among former friends that he could recognize, was himself. But he had no memory of being on the team or even of playing soccer or of the excitement of winning a championship. He reflected that it was not as though he had merely forgotten these events; it was as if he had never participated in them at a conscious level. He wrote that he must have moved through the motions of the game like an automaton, smiling and laughing as his mind had played another game elsewhere.
Smiling and laughing and playing everyday life-games on automatic pilot is what he would still be doing when he arrived in Toronto in 1964. “My defence structure . . . was this ho, ho, ho thing, so much so that no one would believe that anything was bothering me, I was such a happy kid,” he would tell interviewer Loren Lind in December 1968. It was a defence structure that made it difficult for him to get help, or for his parents to see or ever fully accept the psychological difficulties he would soon be having to deal with. In 1971, Barrie would ironically insert the soccer photo near the end of his book of visual poems ABC: The Aleph Beth Book.
High school appears to have been Barrie’s most athletic period — possibly because athletics allowed him a veneer of normality beneath which he could indulge the fantasies that he preferred to his actual surroundings. He slowly improved at running middle-distance races, in 1959 placing third in his high school’s 880-yard event and winning its intermediate-level one-mile race in a time of 5 minutes 30 seconds. At the 1959 Pan-American Games trials he set an under-16 Manitoba record for the two-mile race; he also helped carry the torch into the stadium. In his notebooks he mentions only the Pan-American Games trials events, in a 1971 draft of the poem “Plains.” His track activities were however linked to book-creating. He assembled at least six large scrapbooks of photos and news stories concerning world-class track and field athletes, from Canada’s Harry Jerome to international stars such as Gordon Pirie, Chris Chataway, Vladimir Kuts, Roger Bannister, Emil Zátopek, Derek Ibbotson, Herb Elliott, and Chris Brasher. He hand-drew the covers. Barrie’s fascination with these runners came toward the end of a period in which distance running had enjoyed an unusual prominence in world culture. At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki the Czech runner Zátopek had been celebrated for winning an unprecedented three gold medals; 1954 had seen Bannister, with the help of Chataway and Brasher, run the first four-minute mile, and the Australian Landy break that record just 46 days after; the British Empire Games in Vancouver later that summer saw Bannister out-duel Landy to win the much hyped “Miracle Mile” with both runners finishing in under four-minute times. A larger-than-life bronze statue at the entrance to the games site, Exhibition Park, still commemorates the event. Ibbotson would lower the record in 1957 and Elliott in 1958. At the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, Pirie — arguably the best middle-distance runner of his time — twice lost gold medals to Kuts in sensationally unusual circumstances.
At the same time as creating these scrapbooks — themselves very likely the grounds of fantasy — Barrie was also working on his first comic strip, called “Bob de Cat.” He wrote, “age 15 i begin the comic strip adventures of Bob de Cat, his sidekick Yaboo, and the evil Dr. Nasty influenced heavily at that point by Chester Gould . . . ” (“Comics as Myth: Notes on Method in The Martyrology,” Peters 75). Barrie argued in this “Comics as Myth” essay that his youthful attempt at a comic strip, with its serial structure and seemingly unending narrative possibilities (“entirely open-ended”), was the “original origin” of The Martyrology. With the “hard-boiled” beatnik detective Bob de Cat he had begun establishing “my own mythologic base” from which he could later move to an attempted historical novel “(age 18) THE JOURNAL OF COLONEL BOB DE CAT” that a few years later he “incorporated into ANDY.” Whether he showed these creations to anyone, or merely let them accumulate as parts of his private world, is unclear. The two letters he received from Winnipeg friends after he moved to Vancouver made no mention of his writing, nor did his high school’s yearbooks, which indeed do give prominence to literature, over the three-year period featuring, with poems and photographs, a young woman as Churchill Senior High’s outstanding writer.
In “Comics as Myth” he also wrote that when he took up the comic strip form itself again in 1965 — stimulated, he recalled, by the 1962 arrival of Spider-Man and the resurgence of both Marvel and DC Comics — he caused Bob de Cat, Dr. Nasty, and Yaboo to evolve into “Captain Poetry, nemesis of Madame X, lover of Blossom Tight.” In this understanding of his own history, his main body of writing has both its formal beginnings — its open-endedness — and much of its mythology in Winnipeg in a daydreaming 15-year-old’s apparently private writings. “C.P. [Captain Poetry],” he wrote, “was a simple extension of Bob de Cat, an amalgam of disparate intent who also flourished briefly under the pseudonym John Cannyside in a couple of unpublished prose takes” (Peters 79). With the words “flourished briefly” Barrie very modestly represented his Cannyside project — it was in fact one that obsessed him more than any other except The Martyrology, one that he worked on recurrently over a similar number of years despite never deeming any of the several versions of it he produced worthy of publication.
In the fall of 1960 when his father got word that another promotion and move was likely, Barrie appears to have been leading two very different lives. In one he was a cheerful A-student and promising athlete; in the other he was a confused, withdrawn, sexually troubled, and secretly productive creator of various fantasies, both unwritten and written. Such a condition is perhaps not all that unusual for an adolescent, but Barrie was also putting much more than usual energy into both his selves.