13. The Meanings of Crocuses
As Gramsci notes, language — and culture, I would add — “cannot be anything but ‘comparative,’” always positioned in relation to another temporal moment or geopolitical space and so considered not in terms of identity but of relationality with vectors of power.
— Barbara Godard, Canadian Literature at
the Crossroads of Language and Culture, 26–7
In May 1964 Barrie had written in his notebook that two of his main tasks were to begin deep therapy and to kick his “dreamworld.” By 1970 Book I and Book II of The Martyrology were emerging as the cryptic story of his carrying out those tasks. The process of extricating himself from his dreamworld was being enacted in those books’ slow movement from mythology toward personal history — from fantasy toward autobiography, from timelessness toward time and its correlative death, from imagined “saints” toward “friends.” The wail of dread with which the final passages of Book II were lamenting that the saints were now “dead dead dead” was a wail of resistance to his therapy but also a wail at mortality itself — mortality that Cloudtown and its stories had allowed Barrie to sidestep or ignore. Friends die. “I” dies. The death of Terry the dog — “‘first friend i’ve lost in years’ visvaldis said” — was foreshadowing both the deaths of these saints and of Barrie’s “dreamworld” and also of the preoccupation with mortality and death that will mark The Martyrology’s succeeding books. The “martyrs” of these next books will be not “st and” or “st rike” as much as they will be everyday humanity that must pay the price of unpredictable death in order to have life — as did Barrie’s saints when they left Cloudtown, or Barrie when he left his “dreamworld” and entered therapy. 1
Early in Book 3, when he is struggling to identify what he is writing now that his saints are mostly memories, Barrie writes “the saints are so much smaller than / the real worlds this poem is peopled with.” Reflecting on “the game of distances” he used to play with people he writes:
you there in the air before me
i know your name
you were saint ranglehold in that old game we played of one to one
how boring that seems
we all need so many friends
In the first 30 pages of Book 3 numerous friends appear: David Phillips, whose letter serves as the first of its two epigraph; Ellie, implied by the second epigraph, a Batak prayer for finding a bride; the brilliant and breathless teenage friend Suzette Rochat; Andy Phillips; Rob; Barrie’s sister-in-law Liz; farm staffer Mike Collins; and fellow Hypno I members Nancy Cooper and Julia Keeler.
One of the marks of a successful therapy is the extent to which the patient has internalized the therapist, and begun asking oneself questions similar to those the therapist has posed. As Barrie begins to write The Martyrology, Book 3 in 1971 seven years after entering therapy and after almost two as a therapist, there are several signs that he was now beginning to take a similarly skeptical and inquisitive approach to his text — asking it awkward questions as he was writing and no longer taking its lines, or its “processual” first-thought-best-thought evolution, at face value. This change is similar to the one he made in 1964 to avoid “arrogant” self-expression when he began writing “ideopomes” in the place of “regular poems.” Much of the saint-fantasy narratives of Book I and Book II had also been a kind of self-expression, one that for the most part was untroubled by questions such as what stories his focus on these fantasies was allowing him to avoid, or what lack of daily friendship his imagined companionship with his saints was concealing. A few pages into Book 3, Barrie wrote:
lay in bed three days dreaming of this poem
wrote it down the first draft it came out wrong
the words stilted awkward
as if there were no song to sing
only the flat statement of what i’d seen
a circle in which saint ranglehold stood
holding the letter H within his hand
taunting the man i described inaccurately a poet
the confusion of partial vision
the agony of half lies
the endless catalogues
the exclamations oh
saint of no-names
king of fools
the days are spent in piecing things together
the night’s strewn with pages you do not remember writing
third person to first person
am i the fool
sick of everything i’ve written
fascinated by my own distaste
keep placing one letter in front of another
pacing my disillusionment
As the evolution of the Book II “Friends as Footnotes” implies, these had been years of extraordinary changes and transitions for Barrie — and the speed of change was to continue. From an abject patient of Mrs. Smith he had become vice president of Therafields. From a depressed and possibly failed poet in Vancouver he had become a celebrity of the international concrete poetry movement. From a writer who in his April 1969 notebook essay “Comics as Myth: Notes on Method in The Martyrology” had been proud of his fantasy creations and their connections to popular culture, he had become one at least partly convinced that those creations should “die” because they had crippled or even displaced his relationships with actual people. This displacement might have been useful, even life-saving, in his childhood years when his parents had been unable to respond to his emotional needs, but was stultifying now that his acquaintances included many who both understood and cared about him. The speed of these changes was outpacing the speed with which even he could write and publish. His notebooks show that by mid-1971 he was already drafting several sections of The Martyrology Book 3, such as the “Book of Oz,” that would implicitly criticize and regret his fixation on the saints and other fantasy figures in the still unpublished The Martyrology, Book I and Book II. These sections show him slowly changing his view of the saints as important in themselves to seeing them as parts of his own psychological history, mental states he lived through and came out of — into an everyday world of friends. His saints, and his fascination with them, were becoming parts of his history, his biography, his own myth of origin. When Book 3 would be published in 1976 as part of The Martyrology, Books 3 & 4, this shift would be signalled as well by a change from Roman to seemingly more contemporary Arabic “book” numbers, and by a gradual fading of the purple medieval-manuscript image that had underlain the texts of Book I and Book II. The poem, like Barrie, was emerging from the grip of the past.
The story he tells Irene Niechoda of the 1972 Coach House Press production of Book I, during which, unable to gain any “objectivity over the work,” he frantically rewrote passages before the typesetters could render them permanent (Niechoda 1992 48), is thus utterly understandable. There was little that was intrinsically “wrong” — or repairable — about those passages; Barrie had simply outgrown them. From reading them as the story of the saints-companions of language he had begun reading them as the enacted story of his therapy. Or, as he had written in his notebook on December 5, 1971 — again before Book I and Book II were published — it seemed to him on that day that The Martyrology was a failure in some important way, that there were large matters of importance to him that it should have addressed.
Most likely recognizing that Freudian psychotherapy is implicitly a process of autobiography — the predicaments of the present are to be understood as reiterations of traumas and predicaments in one’s past — and that the psychoanalytic process is a journey back in search of origin, Barrie had begun in 1969 a period of intense interest in family history, autobiography, and literary ways of disguising, encrypting, or distorting autobiography. He had already written the two halves of Two Novels (1969), “Andy,” and the covertly autobiographical “For Jesus Lunatick,” and would revise them for 1971 republication. In May 1969 with Rob he had driven, as a kind of pilgrim to each of his childhood houses and to his mother’s hometown of Plunkett and begun his “Plunkett Papers” in an attempt to give literary and mythological shape to his family’s histories. In 1971 he would begin several autobiographical projects — a poetry sequence titled “Plains Poems,” most of which would become parts of The Martyrology, Book 3, the novel “bpNichol by John Cannyside,” the “Autobiography of Phillip Workman,” and the novel Journal. In April 1971 he had begun a draft of yet another poem sequence, titled “Future Music,” in which he had written, after three deletions, lines that he later included in The Martyrology, Book 3.
I want to write a history of this present moment
brings me here pen in hand
late sun of a spring day
my own shadow on the dandelion
“magic words of poof poof piffles
make me just as small as sniffles”
the saints are so much smaller than
the real worlds this poem is peopled with
In the Dell Looney Tunes comics, “poof poof piffles” had been a magic spell by which the little girl Mary Jane could make herself as small as Sniffles the mouse; Barrie’s saints were now that small.2 He would later incorporate most of “Future Music” also into The Martyrology, Book 3. Significantly, the phrase “future music” — with different connotations — had been a part of the opening pages of The Martyrology, Book I. Barrie was seeing a new future. As well, in the fall of that year he had begun a kind of autobiography of the present, a “book of hours” — a concept that he appears to have abandoned and then reconceptualized in 1979.
Thus in many ways the public face of his life in 1970–71 did not match the private face of his current writing and his thoughts about it.
i am not what I appear
that straightness or fractioning
nothing like the face that floats above me
crying always crying (The Martyrology, Book 3)
The only area in which the two were congruent were in the sound poems being written and voiced by The Four Horsemen, who gave their first performance in May 1970 in poet George Swede’s Toronto studio series, their second in November 1970 at Mount Allison University, and soon began recording compositions for the LP Nada Canadada (usually known as Canadada), which they would release in 1972. Barrie’s 1970 publications reflected mostly his earlier work in “ideopomes” — the boxed and unbound anthology of visual poetry The Cosmic Chef, and the similarly boxed unbound collection of visual poems Still Water.
It was for these two boxed works and for the pamphlets Beach Head and The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid, the latter written in 1967, that in March of 1971 he would be given a surprise Governor General’s Award — the most prestigious Canadian award a writer can receive. In this case, it was an odd award in several ways. It was given for four “books” rather than one. One of the books was an anthology that included only a few pages of Barrie’s own work. Two of the other three, Beach Head and True Eventual Story, were slender works with 24 and 11 pages of text. The co-winner, Michael Ondaatje, was cited for the usual one book, coincidentally titled The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. It had required four Nichols to equal one Ondaatje. The award would perhaps have been much less peculiar had it been given only for Still Water, but presumably the jury members, who included Robert Weaver and Warren Tallman, wished not only to foreground the innovative work of a young writer but also to draw attention to its diversity. (Tallman had written to Barrie in September 1969 that he was interested in “NEW CANADIAN POETRY” and “not innerested [sic] in OLD CANADIAN poetry.”) However it was True Eventual Story — a short ironic narrative in which poet-analyst Barrie had used Stein-like repetitions and humorous Freudian platitudes to portray Billy the Kid as self-destructively gripped by sexual insecurity — by which the award would become known, and through which Barrie would become — at least briefly — notorious.
The award ceremony on May 18 preceded the notoriety by about three weeks. Most likely playfully mindful of the bardic, visionary, and ritual origins of poetry, and wishing to put a bold and personal face on his win, Barrie had Visvaldis design and Ellie sew a loose-fitting beige velour robe, and his friend John Liguore create a wide gold sash for it with hand-painted alphabet characters. The robe resembled the similarly loose fitting velour shirts, also sewn by Ellie, that he had recently begun preferring for everyday wear, but it also reflected his perception — gained mainly through his numerous sound poetry performances — that every public appearance could be an opportunity for self-production. The robe enacted his emphatic refusal of received forms — the usual uniform of the male award winner being a blue two-piece suit. In that robe he was much more “bp” — the poet he had conceptualized and was still creating — than he was Barrie Nichol.3 But he would soon be someone else yet again in Canada’s House of Commons.
BARRIE RECEIVING THE GOVERNOR-GENERAL’S AWARD FOR POETRY FROM GOVERNOR-GENERAL ROLAND MICHENER, MAY 1971.
On June 10, 1971, Mac McCutcheon, Conservative MP for Lambton-Kent, rose in the House to condemn a “questionable piece of literature entitled, ‘The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid,’ authored by B.P. Nichol,” as “an affront to decency and a discouragement to serious literary efforts” and to move that the House express “its displeasure” at its having received a Governor General’s Award, and summon the Secretary of State and members of “the selection board” to appear before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Broadcasting, Films, and Assistance to the Arts (Hansard 6554). Although the motion was denied the unanimous consent required for introduction, Conservative MPs continued to question the government about the award, and the office of the Secretary of State eventually responded by describing Barrie’s pamphlet as “bad pornography badly done.”
Various newspapers also implied that “the 15-paragraph piece, The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid had won the $2500 from the Canada Council” on its own. In reply, Barrie quipped to The Toronto Telegram that the pamphlet must have been “bad pornography” because he was not someone who could write “good pornography” (July 8, 1971, 1). The controversy garnered Barrie nationwide publicity — publicity that was favourably received within most of the arts community, possibly more so than the award itself. He had “épaté” numerous Tory politicians, the most stereotypically bourgeois of “les bourgeois” — not at all a bad thing for a Canadian writer partly grounded in Dada.
Barrie’s public appearance of witty confidence, however, was not necessarily what he was feeling. He had known about the award at least since its public announcement on March 5. On March 13, he had flown to Vancouver to read the next day at the University of British Columbia. He stayed at the home of his juror-friend Warren Tallman, who had arranged the reading. Tallman had been on the Governor General’s poetry jury the previous year as well, and been partly responsible for George Bowering also being a co-winner (with Gwendolyn MacEwen) — a win publicly deplored by older poets Irving Layton and Eli Mandel because it had come, they said, at the expense of a more worthy poet, Milton Acorn, and by critic Robin Mathews, who had argued that both Tallman’s citizenship and Bowering’s writing were treasonously “American.” Tallman’s presence on the 1971 jury had probably been essential to Barrie’s win.
On March 18, 1971, the morning he left Tallman’s house to catch a ferry to Victoria to visit his parents, Barrie penned a startlingly poetic two-page rumination about the award in his notebook. During the visit he had been admiring crocus blooms in the Kerrisdale-area gardens. He began the entry by noting that it is enough for crocuses to exist without poems having to be written about their beauty, and without them having to be venerated in bouquets, or awards. The latter idea, he wrote, sickened him. And so, sitting at the Oak and Forty-first Avenue bus stop, he continued, he felt alarmed and frightened, as if on the verge of a perception he would prefer not to have. About the Governor General’s Award he could sense a “storm” of complaints about to arise, from the numerous writers and critics who had scorned the things he and bissett, Steve McCaffery, David Phillips, and David W. Harris had tried to achieve. Barrie was apprehensive that innuendo and expressions of fear were already circulating; he suspected that the award may have already made the threat that others had felt his work constituted more coherent to them, and that they might attack. He added that it seemed more vital than ever that he should have a clear sense of his person, and of the direction of his writing, but that when he looked at the crocuses they seemed reluctant to embrace their own meanings or consider what each passerby might bring. He wrote that he was feeling fearful, unnerved, by what might be about to happen — that it could change, or even “destroy” him.
THE COVER OF THE TRUE EVENTUAL STORY OF BILLY THE KID, WEED/FLOWER PRESS, 1970.
That such an attack by literary rivals did not materialize was probably due to Mac McCutcheon and his Conservative Party colleagues — very few writers would have wanted to be associated with that party’s widely known contempt for any art not constructable as a “cultural industry.” But it remains a fact that Barrie’s 1971 Governor General’s Award, received mainly because a friend and supporter happened to be on the jury, and given to work that, in the context of Barrie’s career, was juvenilia, would be the only prize his writing would receive. Nor would bissett, Steve McCaffery, or David Phillips ever receive a major Canadian award — at least not as of this writing. The year Barrie died he would be refused a Canada Council senior artist’s grant. Grants and prizes, awarded by “representative” juries, haphazardly regulate the norms of cultural productions; in all his literary work Barrie would ignore such norms.
Barrie also was aware — and to some extent embarrassed — that the books for which he had won the award were not anywhere as strong, or as important to him, as the unpublished ones still on his desk — Monotones, which Talonbooks was about to print, and the two books of The Martyrology that Coach House was committed to publishing. In July 1971, he expressed these misgivings to his Talonbooks editor, David Robinson, who was in regular contact with Tallman. Robinson wrote back, enclosing with his letter new proofs of Monotones:
warren wanted you to win the governor-g’s thing as soon as he heard you read here in january & i’m sure march only confirmed it more, but looking around at your stuff for last year he had a difficult time. he’s told me that still water clinched it, the design & all, the fact that it was boxed, & that form & content were so closely allied in it, but without that i’m sure he wouldn’t have been able to swing it on the basis of the real [sic] eventual and beach head. just consider that you got the g-g a year early, which is pretty much the way it’s going to work out, or better, warren’s just that much ahead of everybody. (August 9, 1971)