16. Working Together
the family is all of man and the history is everyone
— bpNichol in Miki,
Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol, 73
Although in mid-1973 Barrie — not yet having recognized that The Martyrology was itself an ongoing present-tense autobiography — was still in the grip of the unfinished prose “autobiographical” narratives about John Cannyside and Phillip Workman, his new Four Horsemen and TRG associations with Steve McCaffery were leading him in different directions. As early as the spring of 1972, after more than a year of performing with the Horsemen at events in the Toronto area, he had written in his notebook about his dissatisfaction with solo sound — that such poems were now “over” in his work; that he had learned from them all that he had needed. He had begun to see his connection to a collaborating co-performer as more creatively fruitful than his own connection to an audience, telling himself that he had become overly focussed on the responses of the people he was performing for, that he had always “retrogressed” to the material they were most comfortable with rather than moving forward and challenging them with something unfamiliar, that he thus needed to make “drastic” changes in what he aspired to. During 1973–74, the Horsemen, aided by the LP Nada Canadada, which they had released in late 1972, would become nationally known, giving performances in Ottawa, Montreal, Saint John, Wolfville, Hamilton, Edmonton, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. During appearances in the latter three cities they would record the tracks for their next LP, Live in the West, which would be released in 1977. They also began work on what they and their publisher believed would be a collaboratively written book, Horse d’Oeuvres. But the manuscript that resulted, which was published in the PaperJacks mass-market paperback format in 1975, was merely a collection of individual works by the group’s members. “When we were first approached about this manuscript, our impulse was to deliver a unified, collectively written book — a print parallel to our compositions in sound. But we have abandoned that idea,” they wrote in the collectively written foreword. Barrie’s disappointment at this abandonment (which he seemed at the time to have experienced as a literal abandonment by his fellow Horsemen) was partly mitigated, however, by the statement in the concluding paragraph that the group considered the book “the first compositional step in a process leading to more and more written collaborations.”
THE FOUR HORSEMEN IN PERFORMANCE, 1973.
It was mitigated also by the fact that the group had already begun work on a collaborative novel to be titled “Slow Dust.” But by April 15, 1975, even as Horse d’Oeuvres was being published, that effort had been also, in Barrie’s view, failing. He wrote a lengthy passage in his notebook about it, declaring that real collaboration cannnot happen if the collaborators work from preset narrative positions, which is what he saw Barreto-Rivera and Dutton as doing. Each was not responding to anything the others were writing, and thus were taking few risks. For Barrie collaboration required risk. Why were they even attempting the project? he wondered.1 He wrote that he personally had lost “heart” in it when during a discussion Barreto-Rivera had exclaimed that Barrie’s contribution was an example of the kind of writing he most detested.
In his usual psychoanalytic way, he connected his disappointment with his childhood traumas. He observed that he now was feeling among the Horsemen much the way he had felt in his family — that not one of them was listening to what he was saying, that not one even wanted to hear him. Maybe he was causing the problem himself by responding to it much as he had in his family — by joking, or compromising, or accepting dubious excuses. He hadn’t been asserting his beliefs enough, he concluded. He wrote as well that he now also doubted the value, and possibly the authenticity, of the group’s sound poetry collaborations. He wrote to himself that the group had become like a bad marriage. That they were surviving on the memories of the relationship they once had rather than on what they had now. He didn’t want to do any more Horsemen performances because such events were no longer where they “were.” He doubted that they were anywhere.2
In a February 28, 1975, interview with Nick Power and Anne Sherman, Barrie had also mentioned the attempted novel, and said “we aren’t doing performances any more,” and hinted at the interpersonal difficulties they had encountered. “We’ve had difficulty ourselves personally, in knowing what we want to do when we finish a reading.” The applause ends and “there we are, we’re no longer a group and we’re just individuals and it’s often a very dislocating time. That was something we were never quite able to get a hold of” (Miki 2002 164).
The Horsemen would give only one major performance in 1975, and — despite releasing four more recordings and appearing outwardly “together” at concerts throughout the United States and in Europe — would work together only sporadically over the next 13 years.
Barrie’s collaborations with McCaffery as TRG would be equally sporadic, but more because of the formidable preparations that work required and how busy both men were with other tasks than because of any conflict between them. The substantial reading list that eventually appeared in Rational Geomancy, “the collected research reports of the Toronto Research Group, 1973–1982,” contained more than 180 books, including ones by Barthes, Beckett, Berne, Bory, Brophy, Catullus, Caws, Chomsky, Cortázar, Derrida, Gins, Graves, Jabès, Joyce, Kafka, Lacan, Lakoff and Johnson, Mallarmé, Marinetti, McLuhan, Nabokov, Proust, Ricoeur, Robbe-Grillet, Sapir, Saussure, Stein, Steiner, Vygotsky, Whitehead, Whorf, and Wittgenstein. While Barrie outlined much of his personal preparations in his notebooks, he made no criticism there of the process, and spoke only enthusiastically about it when bringing texts it had produced to me for publication in Open Letter. These “reports” would include “The Book as Machine” in the fall of 1973, “The Book as Machine (II)” in summer 1974, “The Search for Non-Narrative Prose” in fall 1974, “The Search for Non-Narrative Prose Part 2” in fall 1975, and “Narrative Interlude: Heavy Company” in spring 1976. The focus on various aspects of narrative led them to begin jointly assembling an anthology for the Coach House Press “The Story So Far” series. It would be the fourth in the series, cleverly titled The Story So Four (1975).
Possibly because of the varieties of writing their preparations were requiring them to read, Barrie’s own writing expanded and mutated, moving from visual poetry to collaborative visual poetry with painter Barbara Caruso, to an oratorio version of The Martyrology done in 1974 in collaboration with composer Howard Gerhard, as well as to ’pataphysical visual and textual conceptions. There would be little public sign of these changes, however. The four collaborations with Caruso, beginning with The Adventures of Milt the Morph in Colour (1972), would be published in expensive limited editions sold mostly to collectors. The Martyrology: an oratorio would be privately published in an edition of 40. Parts of the ’pataphysical “Probable Systems” series, based on Wittgenstein’s The Brown Book, that he began in 1972–73 would not appear until 1985 in the collection Zygal and 1990 in the posthumous collections Art Facts and Truth: a Book of Fictions. The long draft of the serial visual poem Extreme Positions that he began writing in a notebook in the summer of 1973 would not become a book until 1981.
Another collaboration that Barrie attempted in these years was with the Quebecois sound poet Raôul Duguay, of whom he became aware through Barbara Godard’s efforts in 1972 to translate various Quebecois poets’ manifestos for Open Letter. Barrie gave a joint reading with Duguay in Montreal in the fall of 1972, and also interviewed him for the Fall 1973 issue of Open Letter. In the spring of 1973 he wrote in his notebook a reminder not only to transcribe the interview but also to write to Michael Macklem of Oberon Press about creating a joint Nichol/Duguay sound poetry LP under the Oberon imprint, write to Peter Meilleur about an article he had written on Duguay, and write Duguay about contributing some poems to grOnk. Except for the interview, nothing seems to have come from any of these ideas.
Barrie’s way of coping with the large number of concurrent projects he would usually be considering was to work on the ones that were going well or ones that others were eager to see advanced. He continued to participate in Four Horsemen rehearsals and performances mostly because he seems to have believed that the other three members expected him to — for Barreto-Rivera and Dutton the group’s work often had more importance relative to other projects than it had for Barrie. It was also the most likely means for them to circulate their work internationally and to be invited to sound poetry festivals in Europe or the United States. Dutton’s recollection, however, is that it was most often McCaffery and Barreto-Rivera who wished to dissolve the group. Amusingly, Dutton recalls that the group continued almost entirely because of Barrie’s initiatives.3 Quite possibly the different views reflect the chronically poor communication among them. Barrie worked with McCaffery on TRG because their interests in it were equally intense, and because timely publication in Open Letter was possible. He had a similar interaction with Barbara Caruso in their visual work, and assured publication through her own Seripress.
Equally large if not larger editorial responsibilities and opportunities came abruptly into view in the fall of 1974. Victor Coleman, who had single-handedly built Coach House Press into the premiere Canadian leading-edge literary publisher, with books not only by Barrie but by Robert Fones, David Bromige, David McFadden, Gerry Gilbert, Daphne Marlatt, Nelson Ball, George Bowering, Christopher Dewdney, Fred Wah, Robert Hogg, Steve McCaffery, and the Americans David Rosenberg, Ron Padgett, Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer, and Allen Ginsberg, abruptly resigned as editor by sending pained and potentially explosive letters of resignation to Coach House authors, the Canada Council, and the Ontario Arts Council. In these letters he declared his sharp disagreement with the ethics of the press’s financial policies and announced that he was “in the process of trying to redirect” approximately half of the arts council funds that had been allocated to it to a new small press he was hoping to start. He accused the press of “profiteering,” of having become “a sweatshop,” and of planning to use its latest government grants for “the acquisition of equipment for CHP sole proprietor.” He asked all Coach House authors to write to the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council in his support. The copy Coleman had sent to Barrie was headed with a handwritten “bp — Help!” Accompanying it and the other author-letters was a copy of the letter he had written to Ron Evans of the Ontario Arts Council, alleging that “for the past two fiscal years the block grants that we [Coach House] received for ‘publishing’ have gone directly into acquiring equipment for Mr. Bevington’s commercial printing business” and that Bevington had “scuttled” any attempt to publicize most Coach House titles. The letter described the recent Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council block grants to Coach House as a “‘cultural’ grants rip-off.”
The “machinery” or “equipment” that Coleman was referring to in these letters was a set of second-hand business computers with which Bevington hoped to digitize Coach House typesetting, thereby both speeding book production and widening the possibilities for typography and visual effects. In 1978 these would enable Coach House to begin publishing on-demand “manuscript editions” of works-in-progress. Whether Coleman had been more than momentarily outraged by what he perceived to be the situation at Coach House, or had thought through all the possible ramifications of his letters is unclear. However, when in 1996 he recalls the events around his resignation, he makes no mention of “sweatshop,” business ethics, or diversions of funds. He writes that he resigned from Coach House “to become director of [the artist-run gallery] A Space.” He says that he had become less interested in print — had become “increasingly engaged with media other than print as purveyors of the kind of writing I wanted to champion”; and that “[t]he other major reason was my rather naively myopic view of the new technologies of print; namely the dreaded computer/word processor” (Open Letter 9:8 33).
For Barrie — much as for the other authors — Coleman’s bridge-burning missives had come out of the blue. Many who were regular visitors had been aware of his simmering dissatisfaction with the fact that Bevington’s commercial printing necessarily had priority over the production of the Coach House titles, and of his mistrust of Bevington’s ongoing work to digitize the press’s typesetting. But none had foreseen that it might take such extreme form. In Barrie’s case, the situation his letters had created was particularly awkward. Bevington and Coleman were both among his long-term friends. Bevington had befriended him in January 1965, when they had been introduced by Josie Hindley-Smith, and begun almost immediately helping him create his first Canadian book. Coleman had supported him through the stressful publication of the first volume of The Martyrology, Book I.4 Coach House was the publisher of the work Barrie viewed as his most important, with both a reprint of Book I and Book II of The Martyrology and the new Martyrology, Book 3 scheduled for publication in the next year or two. A book by his old friend David Phillips was also likely to be on the press schedule. At the same time, Coleman’s distress was evident in the letters and in his having sent them. But the letters were also potential grenades tossed into Bevington’s unusual and long-standing support of new writers and artists.
Barrie’s immediate and characteristically generous response was to take charge — although perhaps not even he realized at the time that he was — and attempt to resolve the crisis without harm to anyone. Beginning the day the letters arrived he started telephoning the parties involved, visiting Stan, visiting me and Linda, speaking with Coleman and as many of the Toronto-area Coach House authors as he could. He had a psychotherapist’s reading of the extreme rhetoric of Coleman’s letters — i.e. that they were probably true to Coleman’s experience of the situation but not necessarily true to the situation itself, much like Barrie’s memories of his childhood. Coach House had continued to produce the books that its grant applications to the arts councils had promised. Many of the press’s employees accepted relatively low wages because they believed in the cultural importance of the press, or because of the flexibility working there allowed, or because they were learning skills or working with equipment unavailable elsewhere. The computerization of typesetting was promising to open up new design possibilities as well as new efficiencies; the opportunity to computerize was in a sense a windfall that had happened because of Bevington’s friendship with programmer David Slocum who was at the time working at digitizing typesetting at the Globe and Mail. Slocum would later help Fred Wah and myself launch the online magazine SwiftCurrrent.
But the immediate task to Barrie and to most of the authors he spoke with seemed to be damage-control — how to replace Coleman with a credible editorial presence and deflect his accusations. Coleman’s letters had appeared to leave the authors with only the two choices it had created: writing to the councils in support of his new small press and requesting diverted funding, which might constitute corroboration of his charges against Bevington; assisting Coach House to replace him, which might imply that his charges were groundless and his resignation unnecessary. Coleman himself was reported to have told some authors that not supporting him would constitute a “betrayal.” For Barrie, a better course might be to refuse his binary analysis. Coleman’s friendship might be possible to rescue in time, but Coach House needed to be helped before it became unsaveable. Although Barrie may have spoken on the phone to the arts councils about Coleman’s new plans, there is no evidence that he sent either one a formal letter of support.
Late in November, Barrie convened a meeting with Bevington and others at his Therafields office — a symbolically appropriate site under the circumstances. Here he proposed that the “senior” Coach House authors such as Michael Ondaatje, David Young, and myself join him and others — Art Gallery of Ontario curator Dennis Reid, Barrie’s agent Linda Davey — in an unpaid editorial board that would replace Coleman and have regular meetings and minutes, acquire and edit manuscripts, and be able at least to monitor the various issues Coleman had raised. Bevington agreed, and went back to the press to print the postcard, “Coach Announces New Team.” The arts councils continued to support the press. Coleman moved to A Space and started a small publishing venture, The Eternal Network. The new Coach House editorial board would publish books by him in 1978 and 1985. Privately, Barrie’s “practical” position was that if the press could still produce and distribute the books promised in its grant applications, it mattered little in ethical terms through what channels money had flowed to produce them.
The new board, which began work in January 1975, inevitably brought Barrie new responsibilities and complications. He would soon be editing six or more titles a year for the press. His own future Coach House books would be viewable as “vanity” publications — at least by a few dissident Coach House employees who would prefer to be working on ones with more commercial potential. One of his first editorial decisions was to publish Ian Hamilton Finlay’s A Boy’s Alphabet Book through Coach House — he wrote to Finlay with the news shortly after Christmas. Much to the dismay of Finlay, who at times seemed to imagine that Coach House was a large company, and the embarrassment of Barrie, the book was not to be printed until December 1977. It was not eligible for Canadian arts council support, and had to be financed by Bevington’s business.5
Throughout this 1973–75 period Barrie had believed that The Martyrology had ended. He had been mentioning this to most of his writer-friends, including Phyllis Webb, who in August 1973 had responded that she was happy his Martyrology was reaching its end, if that’s what he believed, though for herself she would be equally pleased if it were to continue “forever.” Then she playfully added that perhaps too much thinking about martyrdom could send one to unexpected places. Her remarks expressed an admirable and ultimately appropriate combination of skepticism, enthusiasm, and good wishes — and probably represented the feelings of most of Barrie’s friends. Toward the very end of 1974, however, he began writing what became The Martyrology, Book 4. When giving me a copy of the privately printed A Draft of Book IV of The Martyrology in 1976 he would inscribe it “for Frank & Linda the beginning grows out of a conversation back in time re Dudek.” And in an acknowledgements page at the rear of The Martyrology, Book 6 Books (1987) he would write “Particular thanks too to Frank Davey who has gotten me going again on The Martyrology twice now: once in 1974 with a comment on Louis Dudek’s work that launched me into Book 4, and again in 1978 when i had barely begun A Book of Hours and an observation he made put the work back on track.”
During 1974–75 I had been writing a book on Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster — a book that because of the publisher’s changes in ownership would not be published until 1980. Concurrently, Barrie and I had been editing a collection of Sheila Watson’s essays and stories for the spring 1975 issue of Open Letter, meeting frequently about it at my house. About Dudek we had discussed mostly his long poems, En Mexico, Europe, Atlantis (1967), and his current long poem project Continuation, and how in all of these Dudek had begun without any plan or intention other than to write. The first three were travel poems. In the opening of the third of these, he had thematized travel as a poem — unknowingly foreshadowing both the railroad travel poem Barrie would write in the 1980s, Continental Trance, and Barrie’s interest in the Japanese travel-diary-poem, the utanikki.
One could not write a poem waiting for the train to start.
But once in motion, well in motion,
how is it possible not to begin?
Travel is the life-voyage in little,
a poem, a fiction, structure of illusion!
. . .
Travel, to and from (the place does not matter)
the Ding an sich in a mirror —
Let it speak! (Atlantis 3)
I had suggested to Barrie that Dudek’s challenging himself here to make a poem of his journey echoed both Robert Duncan’s accepting the challenge of going “into the open” to write his serial poem Medieval Scenes in 1947 and William Cowper’s acceptance in 1781 of Lady Austen’s challenge to begin his long poem The Task, in that in each case the poet had agreed to proceed without plan or purpose. Barrie began Book 4 with the line “purpose is a porpoise,” and proceeded with a passage that was pretty well a riff on the concluding pages of Atlantis in which Dudek had proclaimed nature’s “architecture of contradictions and inexorable chances” (148), its “wild turbulence of possibilities. / A spiral nebula. / A sea of milk” (146). “A cloud against the dark mountain. / The white of the moon / There is reality. A white flame” (149), he had declared, and in the last line written “There is the sea. It is real” (151). Barrie’s Book 4 opened
is there a sea
yes
is there a cloud
yes
everything elemental
everything blue
the precision of openness
is not a vagueness
it is an accumulation
cumulous
yes
oceanic
yes &
anything elemental
anything blue is
sky
sea
the heart of
the flame
Another aspect of Dudek’s poetry that Barrie and I had talked about was his acceptance of prosaic or “functional” passages in his poems; his most important poetic theory statement had been “Functional Poetry,” an essay written in poetry in which he had announced that he wanted to reclaim the language of poetry for discursive thought. Although The Martyrology, Book 3 had contained numerous prose-like passages, Book 4 would be the first in which Barrie included prose passages typeset as full-justified prose. This was a development that Barrie seemed to be especially pleased about when he sent a passage from it to Gladys Hindmarch and in the accompanying letter wrote that, to his surprise, The Martyrology was continuing despite him, that his friends were now going to ignore his habitual rushing up and shouting that it was over, that at last he’d finished the thing, since it seemed he never did. He told her that this new Martyrology book was especially interesting to him because of the numerous (for him) technical innovations it contained, especially its shifts from one mode to another, from poetry to prose to playscript and so on, which were giving him more “space” in which to write, and allowing more things to flow into one another.
Throughout, however, many of Book 4’s passages would be utterly unlike those of Dudek in consisting of close deconstructive readings of individual words. “I began,” Barrie would tell Bayard and David in their 1976 interview, “to see the word as a sentence that said things about single letters . . . [T]he word ‘word,’ for instance, becomes ‘w or d’ [. . . .] I would read the word as a sentence and in essence I was into an extension of the Still Water thing, the Love a Book of Remembrances thing, that haiku-like structure [. . . .] [S]ingle letters had symbologies, had contents” (Bayard 39). Barrie wrote multiple sequential pages in Book 4 in which he disassembled individual words as he had in the visual poems of Still Water, using the “sentences” he found thereby within the words to lead him to further sentence-containing words. Again, this was the bpNichol in him writing, bpNichol the ideopoet, punster, language-reader.
the dull pass of wisdom
w is d
o ma
i ’n h and
the me’s restated
at the pen’s tip’s ink
at the tongue’s noise
w in d
din
Blake’s vision of
Golgonooza
In his prefatory note to that privately printed Draft of Book IV, Barrie had also written about how preoccupied he had become with the “unification” of his work — “I have, for a long time, been working toward the unification of what have seemed to many . . . as the disparate areas of my concern. The focal point of that unification process remains THE MARTYROLOGY . . .” (2). His remarks in the Bayard/David interview show that by “unification” here he hadn’t meant only the physical joining of texts, as in the question of whether the text of Monotones should be identified as part of the text of The Martyrology. He had meant also a bringing together of method and form. He had wanted the ability to use in the The Martyrology the same ways and kinds of writing that bpNichol had used in visual poems such as those of Still Water, in the prose of Two Novels or his “some afterwords” to The Cosmic Chef, or in the ’pataphysical “Probable Systems” texts he had been writing out of Barrie’s readings of Wittgenstein — as well as the playscripts he had mentioned to Hindmarch.
The question remains, however, of why Barrie had been so pleased to be able to also believe that The Martyrology had ended after Book 3 — had, as he recalled to Hindmarch, repeatedly rushed to shout to people that it was over, that he’d finished. My guess is that the alternative — as implied by his various notebook meditations on “i” and “we” and by the Book 3 lines “i am afraid of writing something which does not end / as we does not” — may have terrified him. Earlier in Book II he had realized that the end of fantasy leads to the inevitability of death — “dead dead dead” were now his saints. Much like Adam and Eve on leaving Eden, the saints had lost their immortality when they had left Barrie’s self-protective dreamworld of Cloudtown.6 For Barrie in that dreamworld death itself, as whimsical suicide, had been a fantasy. But once outside Cloudtown and in the Therafields’ farm garden death, in the shape of the still dog Terry in Visvaldis’s arms, was palpable, and in everyone’s future. Barrie had titled that concluding section of Martyrology, Book II “Friends as Footnotes,” and Visvaldis had called the dog the “first friend I’ve lost in years.”
In his 1984 book bpNichol: What History Teaches, Stephen Scobie wrote that together with Book 5, Book 4 of the Martyrology was, because of its “drastic dislocations of the very surface of the writing,” “forbiddingly difficult and almost defiantly quirky” (127) — but that it nevertheless realized both a poststructuralist understanding of language and “an audacious combination of frivolity and profundity” (128). The profundity for Scobie resided in the poem’s illustrations of what it termed “the absolute precision / of fluid definition”:
the precision of openness
is not a vagueness
it is an accumulation
cumulous
and its choosing of the “imp-art-i-al” over the “partial.” As Scobie wrote:
To separate a part from the whole is to isolate the individual from the community. The redemption of language, whether through the medium of sound or by the open precision of the poem’s evolving form, leads out of the loneliness the flesh aches with and back to the ideal of community. “we is a human community,” set within history: the city, be it Dilmun or Toronto, is a place to exist as a citizen, as opposed to the “non/man who / believes ONLY in his own self interest” (Book 3). VI (130)
BARRIE AND ROB HINDLEY-SMITH AT THE THERAFIELDS FARM, 1974.
The presence of Therafields in Barrie’s life, with its hopes to build honest communication between individuals and from there a trust-filled community, is clearly echoing behind both Barrie’s writing and Scobie’s reading. Also evident again is a psychotherapist’s skeptical reception of a client’s words — a psychotherapist Barrie Nichol who increasingly in The Martyrology, as David Rosenberg has noted to me, has language, poet-persona bpNichol and his lines of poetry as his clients. The therapist watches and directs as the client free-associates. “what you’re doing in the situation is not imposing yourself on the person but basically being a catalyst,” Barrie had said in that 1976 interview when paralleling his work as a psychotherapist to that as a poet (Miki 2002 147). What the analysand or language says may have more than one meaning. What was intended may be less than what can be found to have been said. Words are not to be taken at face value. Meanings can often be hidden and need to be “revealed” before they can be “reveiled.”
we work
the changes
always
to reveal
lest the actual re-veil itself
a shifting of
the humus
cumulous covers
poetry’s reviled &
spat upon
sweet spit & hhh of breathing
The Martyrology, Book 4, then, marked another sharp intensifying of Barrie’s interrogation of his own writing, an interrogation that began in the 1960s when he rejected his “regular” poems because he suspected them of “arrogance,” continued in 1972 with his frantic dissatisfaction with Book I even as it was being printed, and led in Book 3 to the questioning of the AD and BC of the abcdarium and the dismantling of the dream-given “dogma i am god” — where again bpNichol had found more being said than what had been initially evident.
Shortly before beginning Book 4 Barrie had sat at our dining room table with Linda to catalogue his manuscripts for possible sale to Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections. She was writing notes about each page of his early poems. They had come to the manuscript of “Streetsinger,” that had appeared in Souster’s anthology New Wave Canada — an ostensible “love” poem. What bpNichol had written, however, had not been what Barrie Nichol had then thought he was telling the lovely but tempestuous Dace.
i want
my fingers
on your neck
in your mouth
everywhere to arouse
the sweet singing sound in you
that finds its singer
in me
Barrie had sighed with embarrassment, then ruefully raised his hands slightly apart as if betrayed in the act of strangling someone.