why does it always come back to this, to the sea
— bpNichol, Two Novels,
“For Jesus Lunatick,” 34
The last things Barrie created in Vancouver, on April 7, 1964, were two visual poems, “Mind-Trap #1” and “Mind-Trap #2” — which he drew in his notebook. He signed the first “bpn,” and the second “bp.” The latter — seemingly an alteration of the previous “bpn” — may be the first time he had used this signature. The next entry indicated he had been reading Jack Spicer, and the third was a poem in which he wrote that he had left his room and city to travel to a strange land — possibly a reference both to Exodus 2:22 and to Robert A. Heinlein’s recent novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Barrie lamented having left his friends and being unlikely to see them again for a couple of springs, and described how his train was moving through a landscape of frail trees and melting snow. Despite Barrie’s evident despair here at a move that was recapitulating all his other railroad journeys away from vanishing homes, the small trees would prove to be merely trees, and the snow merely snow, and his friends would soon begin to increase, exponentially.
In the first dream that he recorded in his notebook after reaching Toronto, April 28, 1964, he was a brakeman on a train that was almost demolished by a longer train. The symbolic son-father encounter left Barrie on foot trying to find his way along the tracks. Coming to a ravine, he saw a chubby naked slightly older woman running like a deer between the trees. She reminded him of the character Sarandell from Fellini’s movie 8½. Her skin looked like baked brown clay. She called up to him, asking him colloquially if he would like to have sex with her. The idea repulsed him, a response that his face betrayed. He tried to run away, hoping to reach the forest before she could get out of the ravine. He took a shortcut across a sharp embankment that led to the ocean, but it was muddy and he slipped, and fell down into deeper mud at the ocean’s edge, becoming stuck. Suddenly he heard Sarandell’s animal-like voice approaching and announcing her delight at finding him there. He felt panicked, nauseated, but could make no effort to get away.
The dream brilliantly merged his recent dream about the three Brobdingnagian women, his falling into and getting stuck in the muddy Port Arthur ditch in 1953–54, and his childhood baths with his mother — a stunning dream, and undoubtedly terrifying. But it was not one that would lead Barrie to keep distant from women. His having perceived himself as having “won” the Oedipal struggle to “possess” his mother had left him not only filled with guilt and fear — of being sideswiped by that longer train — but also viewing all women as eagerly available.
On arrival Barrie went to live with his brother Don, and resumed therapy sessions with Lea Hindley-Smith. Through one of her other clients who worked in the Circulation Department of the University of Toronto’s Sigmund Samuel Library, Barrie learned of a job opening there and was quickly hired. Already working in the section was the young poet David Aylward and a young Australian woman of Latvian descent, Dace Puce, who was somewhat older than Barrie and whose name her Toronto friends would often spell as it was pronounced — “Datsi,” or “Datsi Puttsi.” Also working there was Grant Goodbrand, who would become a lifelong friend and colleague. Barrie’s integration into this group was rapid. On May 7 he recorded a dream that appears to be an extension of his Sarandell and Brobdingnag dreams: he had been caught on a muddy bank by a large and unpleasantly pink fish, and as he struggled away his trousers had become smeared with blood and mud. On May 13 he had a dream in which David Aylward appeared. By June he was in a sexual relationship with Dace Puce and had persuaded her to begin seeing Lea. Also in June Grant Goodbrand began seeing Lea, again at Barrie’s recommendation. For Grant, like for Barrie, this would be a life-altering move.
Lea Hindley-Smith — known as “Mrs. Smith” in this period — was a largely self-trained psychoanalyst whose skills and insight surprised nearly everyone who worked with her. Born in Wales to impoverished Jewish immigrant parents, she had worked in London in the early 1930s and early 1940s as an artist’s model while — concealing her Jewishness — independently studying the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Melanie Klein, and Edmund Bergler. She acquired enough expertise to be hired as a counsellor by the Leeds Board of Education in the 1940s. She had brought her husband and children to Toronto in 1948, at first supporting them by operating boarding houses, later by selling real estate, and in 1953 by beginning to accept a small number of therapy clients. Her success with them led to a rapidly expanding practice. She had recently been reconfirmed in her view of psychoanalysis as potentially liberating by her reading of Robert Lindner, who in Rebel Without a Cause and The Fifty Minute Hour had opposed “adjustment” psychotherapy — such as that feared by Barrie’s Vancouver friends — and urged psychoanalyses that would lead to more open and progressive cultures.
Goodbrand, who in his 2010 book Therafields offers a much fuller version of her early life, recalls Lea as having six impressive qualities:
She had an unswerving commitment to tell it as it is to her clients and to relentlessly delve into the secret places that were interfering with their lives. Secondly, Lea had remarkable intuitive gifts that allowed her to see within her clients. She also arrived at a technique to induce abreaction. She was committed to go as far as any client needed in therapy and sometimes unconventionally outside her sessions. She developed her voice forcefully in order to reach the nervous systems of her clients. And lastly she had a heroic energy that broke boundaries in the practice of psychotherapy, upset social norms and envisioned revolutionary social change. (Goodbrand 25)
He also suggests that “Lea idealized artists and the importance that artistic talent could have in psychological healing.” Such a view of the arts, plus her intellectual curiosity about psychoanalysis, and the various periods of enterprising self-employment that poverty had led her to undertake, made her a considerably different person from Barrie’s mother.
When Barrie began regular therapy sessions with Mrs. Smith in the summer of 1964 she had 64 individual-therapy clients who also met in “deep” groups, 36 of whom lived in “house groups” she had invented and established, plus a dozen or more who came to her only for individual therapies. She was also meeting with a “Catholic Group” of monks, priests, and nuns, which had been brought to her through her friendship with Gregory Baum, a senior professor at St. Michael’s College and a theological advisor to the Vatican II Council. Barrie would very quickly decide to live in one of her house groups — large houses in which Hindley-Smith clients would live together as a “family” and meet approximately twice a week with her to analyze, examine, and attempt to understand whatever disagreements and conflicts had occurred among them.
But there was another forceful woman now in Barrie’s life — Dace. Barrie and Dace’s relationship was torrid, tempestuous, mutually obsessive, reckless, and at times as disastrous as his dream on May 7 possibly foretold. Both lovers were almost suicidally insecure and yet also would-be free spirits. For a short time Barrie and Dace lived in the same Hindley-Smith house group at 152 Howland Avenue, and later in neighbouring house groups. From the numerous scribbled notes that Dace wrote and shoved under the door of Barrie’s room — and which he preserved — their interaction would appear to have been a long series of breakups, desperate pleas, threats of suicide, passionate reunions, drunken remorse, heartfelt apologies, and more passionate reunions — much like the young woman he later portrays in “For Jesus Lunatick.”
fucking bastard pawing at her god no but hold me please for christ’s sake hold me it gets so lonely who was he shit she just didn’t know what she was doing here please hold me where are you going i can’t even find you sometimes lying on top of her and looking up into his eyes wondering don’t go i mean do you have to it’s early still why did i do those things i mean why did i hold me please phil hold me i love you you know do you love me phil do you you seem so far away phil you fucking bastard think you can come in here and use me for your little thrill and go well piss on you don’t go please phil don’t go i’m sorry i must have been drunk you know stay awhile longer and just talk to me why don’t you you’re always going to sleep on me just talk to me why don’t you do something for christ’s sake don’t just lie there i feel so fucking frustrated please phil make love to me phil please you bastard. . . . (25)1
Barrie’s entrenched fear of being engulfed by women contributed to the frequent breakups as much as did Dace’s history of pain at being seemingly thought unworthy by those she loved. Barrie appears to have often retreated into solitude, to which Dace would respond with melodrama, excessive drinking, and threats of recklessness and self-damage — threats that would often, as she hoped, draw Barrie back to “save” her. In his book, Goodbrand gives a glimpse of the two of them, in which he assigns Dace the pseudonym of “Sheila”:
Sheila, a young and lovely Australian girl doing her walkabout through the rest of the world, worked with us at the library and had also temporarily moved into the house. Sheila and Barrie became romantically involved. [. . .]
When I arrived, Barrie came down . . . from an upstairs room and asked me to wait for him . . . because he was involved in trying to calm down an upset house member. [. . .] Within minutes, Sheila, clearly drunk or on drugs, flew down the steps from the third floor, taking them two at a time, pursued by Barrie. She screamed that she would go to Yonge Street and find herself a man. I heard the screech of a car, and as I bolted for the door I saw her pick herself up and run off. Barrie apologized to me and said he was going to go to Yonge Street to try and stop her. (13–14)
Their extreme romance — Goodbrand would come to see it as an “infatuation” while others who worked with them in the library would view it as the throes of “first love” — would continue throughout 1964 and most of 1965. It was not a therapeutic relationship for either. Dace would have a long and painful induced miscarriage from mid-January to late February of 1965 — in his notebook Barrie recorded numerous days of comforting her and himself before she was rushed to hospital. He recorded the room number where he visited her — and recorded also his various feelings of selfishness, love, depression, and self-disgust. In March he wrote that he felt like destroying her mentally. In May he wrote that he felt very warm and affectionate with her, and that their relationship was improving. By the end of the year, however, they again tumultuously separated. Goodbrand’s recollection is that Barrie still wished to get back together with her but that Lea told him that if he did, he should find another therapist — essentially telling him that he would have to choose between them.
At the beginning of his notebook entries about Dace, Barrie usually called her D, then changed to referring to her as A. In late February 1965 when visiting her in hospital he referred to her by her name and continued then to do so. In his entry of May 10 he noted explicitly that he had called Dace A in many of his earlier entries — as if foreseeing that someone might someday read the notebook and perhaps think he had been deeply involved with two women concurrently. My guess is that someone as alphabet-conscious as Barrie — who had once lived in Wildwood Park’s H section and had used the alphabet to find his way home — considered Dace to be A because she was indeed his first love, his first. She was not the first woman he had not run from, but the first he had come back to after running from. He was running and coming back over and over. In a way this was progress — but, as Lea was observing, not a progress one could easily progress from. Dace was often unwittingly like the two people he had once perceived his mother to be — one holding him away from her tempting beauty as they danced, the other engulfing him in her Sarandell-like sexuality in the bath.
In the “Clouds” section of Book II of The Martyrology, written 1969, Barrie intermittently found himself remembering Dace. Like many of the sections of the early books of the poem, it is one in which he addresses saints who are, as he wrote in a marginal note on the manuscript of this section, “real figures ripped from the mind of my own voices . . . finally then it is myself that I address everything to.” The lives of his saints, including their sexual lives, “weren’t in fact allegorical,” they were Barrie’s own lives (quoted in Niechoda 1992 121). Irene Niechoda in her Sourcery for Books I and II of bpNichol’s The Martyrology reports that Barrie told her that, four years after his “compulsive attachment” to his relationship with Dace had ended, confused recollections of her puzzlingly returned while he was writing the “Clouds” section. Writing of the amorous relationships of his saints had, to his surprise, somehow invited Dace and his relationship with her into his writing. In a second marginal note he had written, “always there is this dual rhythm of opposites since it is true some things are over dead and gone these past four years why is it now I find myself returning to her face as in the image of a poem that is not forgotten tho it should be.” (Niechoda 1992 121–22)
Numerous of the lines of this section have double meanings, as when Barrie writes:
yeah & when you looked in there
into those clouds they called her eyes
was it a surprise to see your own death mirrored
and the “you” can be either “saint and” or Barrie himself, or the bpNichol poet speaking to Barrie. Or again,
i enter the softer world of women
seeing your face saint and
I remember the tales they tell
how you fell from the cloud world to the earth
from the earth into her eyes
who was not a woman but simply the disguises trouble wears
braiding up its hair
so you would touch her
Or yet again,
you pissed it away in suffering
looked [sic] up with a chick the village fool could see thru
& avoided
that lady almost destroyed the muse
& you let her use you
willingly for your own destruction
these are the times I could curse your name
were it not so pointless blaming you
In later parts of the section, Barrie’s writing and memories become less ambiguously personal:
faces cloud in on me
lost as i am mostly dreaming
streets filled with memory brush against me
library daze
the dust & centuries pile up within the mind’s
gestures
as if she were a part of history
history being in me is my story
my vision of the world’s end &
beginning
Dace is a part of his history, he recognizes, as the library books that he has read directly or indirectly are also a part of his history. “Who did I love having said I loved you / holding your body in the narrow bed” he asks. “Fear,” is the answer, as the following stanza, written by Dace herself, should have told him.
“now that spring is here
winter anguishes that froze upon the air
reinstate their agony”
Moreover his own part in their recurring difficulties — that fear, the fear of giving up the solitude he embraced while watching the clouds over Wildwood Park, or imaginarily walking the streets of Port Arthur with Dick Tracy — is still with him, and interfering with his more recent relationships.
who is it in this other room I’ve found
holds out her hand I cannot take it
[. . .]
i am i because i fear the we
deeper mystery without solitude
Dace’s letters and Barrie’s notebook entries firmly suggest that this fear of “the we” wasn’t just a fear of being close to another human but specifically of being close to a female partner. The similar textual records of his interactions with Vancouver friends such as David and Andy Phillips or with new friends such as Goodbrand and David Aylward show no signs of such desperation, tumult, or fear of “we.” Moreover, the fear of women shows much more severe extremes than The Martyrology passage suggests, ranging from the anxious pursuit portrayed by Goodbrand to the callous disregard implied by Dace when she wrote to her “Dearest Barry” that he had “closed” on her completely. On one remarkable 1966 occasion she wrote accusing him of sounding unemotional and detached whenever he declared his love for her, and announcing that she was again breaking off with him, and he turned the page over and sketched on the back one of his most successful verbal-visual poems of that year, “Historical Implications of Turnips” (also published as “Turnips Are”), and its evocative ending of the fleshy “punstir” turnips “spurtin.”