5. Vancouver, 1960–64

“I wanted to be an archaeologist . . .”

— bpNichol, quoted by Niechoda in A Sourcery, 95

Unlike Glen Nichol’s earlier promotions and transfers, the one that ended the family’s second period in Winnipeg did not occur in late springtime. Glen was transferred in the fall of 1960 to Vancouver to look after Canadian National’s international freight operations there. Barrie and his mother left Winnipeg in December once he had completed the fall term of Grade 11; they settled with Glen into an apartment on West Seventieth Avenue in south-central Vancouver. Deanna, who was now in the second year of nursing school, remained in Winnipeg. On enrolling at Sir Winston Churchill High School — a name coincidentally echoing that of the Winnipeg school he had just left — Barrie encountered the same confused perception of Manitoba’s 11-grade-plus-senior-matric school system that Don had encountered on moving from Manitoba to Ontario in 1953. In British Columbia, as in Ontario, the senior matriculation year followed Grade 12, not Grade 11. Thus the Vancouver school board reasoned that if Barrie had been six months from entering senior matric in Manitoba, he should be placed into Grade 12 at Sir Winston Churchill. He was enrolled in ongoing Grade 12 versions of the Grade 11 courses he had been taking in Winnipeg. Lacking much of the background that had been taught in the first term, he struggled, particularly in physics, and his marks plunged from an 81% average during his half-year in Winnipeg to a C average in Vancouver.

“THE POSTMAN,” A 1955 SCULPTURE BY PAUL HUBA COMMISSIONED FOR THE VANCOUVER POST OFFICE.

His one new friend at Sir Winston Churchill was Andy Phillips, who would later become the title character of Barrie’s novella Andy, and whose brother David, a year younger, was an aspiring poet. Like Barrie, Andy was a track athlete. Both of them ran for the school’s track team and also joined the Vancouver Olympic Club. On graduation they enrolled in the fall of 1961 for Grade 13 — senior matriculation, and equivalent of first year university — at King Edward College in Vancouver’s Kitsilano district. Here Barrie encountered and made friends with a number of students — most of them graduates of Lord Byng High School — who like him were seriously interested in poetry and the other arts. Among these were James Alexander, who would soon launch the poetry magazine Adder, Neild Holloway, and Dezso Huba, whose recently widowed mother Sybil had returned to university to complete an arts degree. Dezso’s late father Paul had been a sculptor, and his various works in stone filled the Huba apartment.¹ Andy Phillips recalls Sybil Huba as both spiritual and artistic, and their apartment on Yew Street as a place not only of art but of incense, art magazines, and spirited discussions of aesthetics and inspiration — a much different home from the functionally furnished one Barrie was sharing with his parents. At this apartment Barrie met another member of the ex–Lord Byng circle of students, Arnold Shives, who was beginning his first year at the University of British Columbia, but would have preferred to be studying drawing and painting. Barrie also met poet Judith Copithorne, who lived in the same building and was a regular visitor at the Hubas’ — as Barrie himself quickly became.

In a 1976 interview Barrie told Caroline Bayard and Jack David that his favourite poets when a teenager were “Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Dr. Seuss, Wilfred Owen. I loved Keats.”

Up to seventeen, those were the people — and D.H. Lawrence. Dave Phillips and I used to read Lawrence and Patchen. It was about then that I started to get into Creeley and Ginsberg. The person who particularly impressed me at that time was Lew Welch and some of Philip Whalen’s things. I was into the visual thing from Patchen — through his poem-drawings — and around that time, a friend of mine, James Alexander, introduced me to some of the Dada people and Apollinaire. (Bayard 17)

Barrie was telescoping his Vancouver period somewhat here. The first part of his list of poets — from Pogo to Lawrence — reflects mainly his Port Arthur and Winnipeg years. The second part — from Lawrence to Patchen — are most likely the writers who came to Barrie’s attention through Andy and David Phillips and James Alexander in his half-year at Sir Winston Churchill and Grade 13 year at King Edward, January 1961 to June 1962. Creeley, Ginsberg, Welch, and Whalen were poets that he was much more likely to encounter in Vancouver, particularly at UBC at this time more than anywhere else in Canada. Creeley had already made two well-received visits to Vancouver and by the spring of 1962 had been appointed to teach Creative Writing there. All four were in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry Anthology, 1945–60 which, because of UBC professor Warren Tallman’s classes and the activities of the Tish writers during 1961–63, had become known throughout the city’s arts communities. Barrie noted in a 1979 interview with Ken Norris that he had learned of the last writers on his list — the Dadaists and Apollinaire — from Alexander in 1963. In the case of the Dadaists he truly had learned only “of them” — “I wasn’t quite sure what exactly they’d done. . . . I didn’t really have examples because you couldn’t lay your hands on examples. I wasn’t going to a university” (Miki 2002 238–39). Barrie did attend university in 1962–63, and spent the summer of 1963 with his brother Don in Toronto, so his learning “of” Dada probably occurred late that year.

His year at King Edward seems to have been mainly one of making important friendships and updating his knowledge of literature. For the first time he was discovering young people with interests and ambitions similar to his own. On enrolling he had on a “sheer whim” selected teaching as his academic objective. He told Irene Niechoda:

I had gotten into teaching through sheer whim, there was no real desire. There was just a teacher standing in front of the room, so I ticked off the role “teacher” — there was no real thinking at all. I wanted to be an archaeologist, but couldn’t figure out how to do it from university calendars. It never occurred to me that you could get counselling. I got a scholarship [$500] to go to King Edward College that paid my costs. (Niechoda 1992 95)

He was writing, but privately — showing his work mainly to his new friend David Phillips. “I was a very secretive writer for the first six or seven years of my writing,” Barrie recounted to Caroline Bayard. “Dave Phillips and I used to show each other our stuff in Vancouver” (Bayard 24).

BARRIE’S 1962 KING EDWARD HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION PHOTOGRAPH.

Both he and Phillips enrolled at UBC in the fall of 1962, Phillips in first year arts, and Barrie in second-year education. Barrie also got permission to audit UBC’s introductory creative writing course, English 202, taught by Jake Zilber, and began attending the meetings of the student club the “Writers Workshop.” In both Zilber’s course and at the workshop he encountered the already publishing student-poets Robert Hogg, David Cull, and Jamie Reid. At the time Reid was a co-editor with myself, George Bowering, Fred Wah, and David Dawson of Tish. Barrie’s insecurity and secretiveness, however, were such that none of these writers took much note of him, or would later be able to recall his presence.

He began keeping a journal or notebook. He made one of the earliest entries on January 15, 1963, after attending a Bob Hogg reading and talking with Neild Holloway, writing that the problem with his own poetry was that it was too melodramatic and vague — and that he, Holloway, and James Alexander all agreed about this. He then added quotations or misquotations from Arnold Shives; Holloway (advice that he should keep a notebook); his Grade 13 teacher, Mary Fallis (that “concrete better than abstract in a poem”); Creeley (“FORM is merely AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT”²); James Alexander (“It’s the baldness of the Black Mountain style that troubles me”); and Jake Zilber (“The system of notation now coming into use may one day become a convention”). The entry reflected many of the commonplace arguments occurring that year in the Vancouver poetry communities.

Toward the end of the 1962–63 academic year there was excitement among the writing students at UBC over the impending summer-session poetry writing workshop and associated events — later to be mythologized as the “1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference” — at which Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and Margaret Avison would be lecturing and advising. Hogg, Cull, Reid, Dawson, and Wah all enrolled, and Bowering audited. Possibly because he felt unqualified, or more likely because of increasing psychological distress, Barrie instead accepted his brother Don’s invitation to spend the summer with him in Toronto, where he could meet Don’s lay psychoanalyst Lea Hindley-Smith. It was also the last year Barrie would be young enough to travel on one of his father’s CN Rail passes. Once arrived, he got a casual job at Frontier College from which, he wrote in his notebook, he could take hours off at any time to visit Mrs. Hindley-Smith. In a 1968 interview Barrie gave this explanation for how he was spending that summer:

So I came to Toronto to visit my brother and in those days I would say I was pretty freaked. To put it mildly. I sort of went into six month long depressions and stuff, pretty out of it most of the time. And my brother knew of this group that was just forming. He recommended that I should come and see Mrs. Smith. (Lind interview, December 11, 1968)

In his new notebook Barrie recorded only a few hints about the causes of his distress and depressions. Most of these centred on women, and were quite possibly occasioned by his increasing interactions in Vancouver with young woman friends. Among entries that begin on July 13, 1963, there is a poem “For Laura” that describes him and her as “one-way” lovers who are travelling toward hell. Then there’s an outline for a short story that would take place in a theatre and beside a nunnery. A guy who had been watching a movie would see an attractive nun and want to know her and love her despite being afraid of sex, but then think of her as unattainable and his love as pointless and useless. Quite possibly Barrie had encountered a young nun through therapist Lea Hindley-Smith who, with the permission of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, had begun counselling one or two. And then he wrote a disturbing entry about material in his recent dreams: there had been landscapes like the Everglades swamps, enormous naked bodies, mountains that resembled vegetables, and in one dream three naked Brobdingnagian women. Barrie would have encountered Jonathan Swift’s Brobdingnag and its women while reading Gulliver’s Travels in his English 200 course that spring at UBC. At roughly 10 times human size, the young Brobdingnagian “maids of honour” and their playful sexuality overwhelm and disgust Gulliver. When they place him “directly before their naked Bodies,” he writes, it is to him “very far from being a tempting sight, or from giving me any emotion other than horror and disgust.”

Their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than pack-threads. . . . Neither did they scruple while I was by to discharge what they had drunk, to the quantity of at least two hogsheads, in a vessel that held above three tuns. The handsomest among these maids of honour, a pleasant frolicsome girl of about sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her nipples, with many other tricks, wherein the reader will excuse me for not being over particular. But I was so much displeased, that I entreated Glumdalclitch [his assigned teenage “nurse”] to contrive some excuse for not seeing that young lady any more. (95–96)

It seems likely that these passages in Swift had reminded Barrie, at least unconsciously, of his childhood baths with his mother and his anxieties about having offended his father.

Despite Don’s misgivings about Barrie’s well-being, and Barrie’s own about having received only a pass in practice teaching (the UBC course, according to transcripts from that year, offered grades of First class, Second class, Pass, and Fail), Barrie left Toronto by train on August 15, planning to visit Deanna in Winnipeg for four or five days before arriving back in Vancouver on August 24 or 25 to take up a teaching position at Viscount Alexander Elementary in surburban Port Coquitlam. He had written to ask the Port Coquitlam school board what kind of class he would be teaching, but would not receive the news that he had been assigned a Grade 4 class of “slow learners” until mere days before school began.

In mid-September he arranged to rent a room in a house at 1335 Comox Avenue in Vancouver’s then-bohemian west end where his friend David Phillips was also renting a room and where David’s long-term girlfriend Barbara “Barb” Shore lived nearby. Both David and Barbara were continuing their studies at UBC. Sometime that fall Barrie became involved with a young woman named Louise, who appears to have also rented at 1335 Comox, variously referred to in letters from Barrie’s friends as “Lou” or “Lulu.” It is clear from letters she would write to him the next year that she took their relationship seriously, and wished they might have married, even if somewhat unhappily. However, although Barrie will frequently refer to “Dave” and “Barb” in poems about “1335 Comox,” he will never mention Lou by name, and may in fact have not answered many of her letters. Virtually living with a couple such as David Phillips and Barbara Shore had quickly awoken old Oedipal emotions in Barrie; his attraction to Barb and its consequences will result in numerous references in his poetry to Comox Avenue being a scene of pain, confusion, and disaster — and possibly also to “Lou” slipping out of his memories. The line in The Martyrology, Book II in the “Auguries” passages about Comox Avenue, “she is a ghost who walks among my feelings” (identified by Irene Niechoda as referring to a later lover, Dace Puce), probably refers to Barrie’s mother, and to his increasing Freudian insights into his unhealthy relationship with her, rather than to Puce or one of the Vancouver young women. That is, the line appears to quietly signal his realization that he had been unconsciously transferring his much earlier (thus “ghostly”) sexual feelings toward his mother into the feelings he experienced when with young women his own age.

In his notebooks he appears to mention Louise only three relatively brief times. In the most extensive of these she appears as a “chick” that he breaks up with early in 1964. He wrote that he had had to break up with her before his emotions had become too involved, but that he was also recognizing that for some reason he tended to break off quickly with each woman he had a relationship with, and was wondering what it was he feared with them. Then he answered himself, saying that the explanation was obvious, and painful, but that he couldn’t deal with it until he was back in Toronto and seeing Lea. Was he already recognizing the Oedipal trap he was in? — his reflections were pointing that way, but were in no way explicit.

By name he mentions Lou only twice. On one April 1964 page there is a blank space that once held a photo, and beneath it her name, that she had inspired most of the poems he had written in the past four months, and that the photo had been taken in the yard of a house in New Westminster. On the page before he had written a summary of a dream he had had on April 28. In it he was visiting Viscount Alexander Elementary, and some children who were playing a game had asked if “Mr. Nichol” would join them. Their woman teacher, who he wrote he thought was Lou, told him he was supposed to touch one of the girls, so he touched one of the taller ones. He was not sure what she did then, but he found himself on the ground and had worried that he was sinking into it. It’s one of several dreams he would record in these years of being overwhelmed or enveloped by a woman. He was being haunted here by the “ghosts” of two aspects of the Oedipal drama — his forbidden desire for the mother, and his fear of being sexually overwhelmed anyway by the forbidden woman, as in his traumatic childhood baths. The tall girl is a plausible description of his young mother. If he touches her, he falls into her.

Barrie would later recall 1963–64 as an uncomfortably divided year in which he spent half of his time wearing a tie and attempting to be the respectable schoolteaching “Mr. Nichol,” and the other half at Comox Avenue believing he was trying to be a hard-drinking, peyote-eating, and carousing young poet.

I was still very much involved with all the old crowd I had been involved with before, running around doing freaky things on weekends, all of that, so there was this real sort of dichotomy, sort of the mad bohemian and the straight school teacher — your choice of exciting roles. That’s really what they were then, each one was just [a] kind of a role, where I was I don’t know, I was just somewhere in between all sort of this mania. (Lind interview)

In literary terms, however, 1962–63 was not a particularly bad year. It began with his declaration in his notebook that he intended to purchase and read all of Malcolm Lowry, Irving Layton’s Balls for a One-Armed Juggler and A Red Carpet for the Sun, and F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith’s anthology The Blasted Pine, as well as most of the Paris Review interviews, and subscribe to the Paris Review, Evergreen Review, Tamarack Review, Evidence, and Tish. In November he read Lionel Kearns’s essay “Stacked Verse,” and listened to Jamie Reid read Charles Olson poems. In December he recorded that he was halfway through reading Pound’s ABC of Reading and had become unhappy with everything he had been writing. In January he wrote that he was reading one of Robert Duncan’s “The Structure of Rime” poems and reflected that his most important influences were probably Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Patchen, and William Morris. He recorded reading numerous books by Kerouac, Burroughs, and Trocchi, as well as Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook — although his response to these was that there was nothing left for one to do in prose and that all he could hope to do was write poetry.

He went to writers’ meetings and listened to the arguments of Jamie Reid, David Cull, and Bob Hogg, whom he somewhat scornfully called Black Mountain “devotees” and declared himself at least partially unconvinced that their way was the only way. On November 13, 1963, he reconsidered his own ideas about poetry, having had a long talk with Reid and Shives. He wrote that he thought his style was due for a change. He argued with himself about whether poetry was an act of communication, and if so with whom did it communicate — with one’s intellectual peers or only with oneself? Was it ethical to want to communicate only with oneself? By January 1964 his arguments brought him to a frantic despair in which he printed a line of expletives in capital letters across the page, and in further capital letters wrote that he could see no sense in the notebook he had created, that it was useless and stupid. Then in smaller letters he wrote that everything he had done before and most likely everything he would do in the future would be pointless, no matter how hard he worked. And then he jokingly wrote a title for this text that declared it the work of a masochist, but followed that with more capital letters in which he seemed to shout at himself for never being serious about anything. It was a clumsy text, but oddly foreshadowing the playful and graphically adventurous work he would create later. From it he segued into another unsuccessful but highly innovative text — a mock dramatic script about a Vancouver poetry gathering at UBC’s Brock Hall at which Hogg, Cull, Shives, Alexander, Nichol, Roy Kiyooka, Kurt Lang, Fred Douglas, and Judith Copithorne were all characters and uttered amusingly predictable non-profound lines.

But while his literary education that year was broad and stimulating, his teaching year was not going well. He explained to Irene Niechoda:

I was just eighteen when I started teaching, just a babe — and a crazy one at that! I was teaching grade four, thirty-nine of them, the “slow learners” class. And I was terrible, probably more disturbed than them. And most of them were disturbed, it wasn’t that they were slow. [. . .] I had no sense of discipline, so I’d be grabbing kids by their hair, and then I’d start feeling total guilt and mortification about it. I’d sworn I’d never have a kid strapped — I was death on strapping. Mind you, I’m pulling their hair! In fact, when I finally did have a kid strapped, that’s when I finally quit. (1992 95)

It was March 13, 1964. Although Barrie went on to tell Niechoda that he had then decided to move immediately to Toronto and re-enter therapy — a move he said that he had previously hoped to make in September in the company of David Phillips and Barbara Shore — there were other factors in this decision. One was a stern letter from his brother Don, who had heard through their parents of Barrie’s resignation from teaching and surmised the crisis Barrie now was in. He told Barrie that he had written to them, telling them that their youngest was passing through some “natural” changes, things that most young men encounter. He hoped that he had prevented their mother from feeling too concerned or guilty. The word “guilty” perhaps suggested Don’s own interpretation of Barrie’s past. He indicated also that he had been talking to Lea about him, and that she was surprised that he had lasted in Vancouver as long as he had. Ordering Barrie to leave Vancouver at once, he wrote that the current crisis at least showed that his neurosis was ripe for treatment. He added that jobs in Toronto were plentiful, and would be until the university term ended in late April.

A second and possibly more likely reason Barrie left for Toronto so suddenly was the abruptly burgeoning Oedipal tension in his growing relationship with Barbara Shore — at least one of Barrie’s friends at the time believed that this was the only reason. James Alexander, David Phillips, Barb Shore, Dezso Huba, and Arnold Shives were among those who accompanied Barrie to the CN train station. It was April 11. Alexander and Phillips were somewhat angry; they did not believe in psychiatry or — as they put it — in “getting adjusted,” and feared that it would be the end of Barrie’s creativity. Shives, however, recognized the desperateness of his situation and was glad that his friend would at least be receiving some kind of help. Barrie himself felt as negatively about his situation as any of them. In his notebook he wrote that even though he was heading to Toronto he was sure that he had no future and certainly no idea of what the coming years might bring. He again wrote about pointlessness — that the struggle inside him, the struggles around him, and his struggles to write were all without point. There was no one who might understand.