Six days and seven nights the wind and storm flood.
— Gilgamesh XI, 127
Beyond the writing of The Martyrology, Book 4, 1975 was an extremely busy year for Barrie. The first of several financial and philosophical crises was erupting at Therafields as the long-term effects of the 1973 oil shortages rippled through North America. Amid rapid economic inflation, work to develop the farm so it could support both therapy marathons and rural house groups was becoming increasingly costly at the same time that the general shift in society toward political conservatism was becoming evident within the membership. Therafields saw a decline in volunteerism and a growing desire among the therapists to have their work viewed as a business — a business that many of them believed should be both financially and socially separate from the farm and Lea Hindley-Smith’s community-building aspirations.
In his Therafields history, Goodbrand suggests that he and his downtown therapist colleagues had begun embracing a North American understanding of psychotherapy as an entrepreneurial service provided to individuals, and abandoning Lea’s more European understanding of it as an enabler of social awareness, justice, and creativity — what Lacan would call “le lien sociale” (1974 51).1 In a general sense, the latter understanding was at least as old as Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents; it had been followed by Lea in her readings of Klein, Reich, and Lindner when she set up house groups in which her clients could learn to live socially. It was now being re-understood by Barrie in his McCaffery-influenced readings of Kristeva, Derrida, Georges Bataille, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It seems very likely that his continued concern throughout Book 4 with enacting a “we” that both contains and enlarges the “i” was at least in part a product of the Therafields turmoil, as in the passage in which he follows Robert Graves’s bethluisnion/“alphabet of trees” from The White Goddess to write:
the B gins us
A’s the birth
tree
day of
celebration
I
the death
yew
loss of we
which is our perfect B
ginning
false pride of individuality
that i am
yes
but i was of
came from
this soil.
A March 1975 report had noted that Therafields would be $55,000 in debt for the fiscal year, and projected a debt of $150,000 at the end of the 1975–76 fiscal year. A lack of volunteer labour would lead to the hiring of non-Therafields construction workers to complete the 3000-square-foot kitchen needed to feed those expected at the weekend marathons. Nevertheless in 1976 Barrie and the other Therafields directors approved borrowing a further $170,000, with Lea Hindley-Smith’s encouragement, to expand the farm’s acreage. These figures and expenditures continued to alienate most of the senior therapists, whose salaries, because of inflation, had fallen in purchasing-power by 30 percent since 1973, and increased their resentment that significant portions of the fees they earned were being used to support Therafields administration and the farm development (Goodbrand 170-71). As vice president and member of the board of directors that made most managerial decisions, and as the management person viewed by the therapists as the most reasonable and accessible, Barrie had much of his time consumed by consultations and meetings.2
Some indication of the extent and content of the philosophical turmoil at Therafields can be gathered from a front-page editorial in the March 24, 1975, Therafields general circulation newsletter A Publication — then being produced in editions of 800 copies by Barrie with four other “coordinators.” The editorial itself seemed to contain several divergent viewpoints.
We have some major areas to reevaluate: 1. Finance, can Therafields survive on its current financial basis? 2. Living arrangements. What is the value of house groups. Were they meant to be more or less permanent living arrangements? Where and how do we want to live? 3. The value of long-term therapy for all. Is theradrama working to the depths it is capable of? 4. What is the place of writing in Therafields? 5. The place of the physical program in theradrama. 6. When an organism veers toward organization and a variety of services (housing, massage, bio-therapy, groups, work and social situations), does that organization tend to attract people whose needs are more for protection by such an all-inclusive umbrella rather than people who need help in discovering their own purposes?
The attempt to transition from a treatment-focussed institution to one that was also an enabler of both creative and lifestyle opportunities was creating not only conflict but also possible therapy contradictions. It was also bringing into focus the fact that while treatment could support itself financially through fees, a new lifestyle environment was not necessarily self-financing. The re-evaluation would continue until the fall, and in early 1976 result in Lea, Barrie, and Rob reorganizing the administration of Therafields so as to reaffirm its commitment to the farm and the idea of an “environmental centre.”3 But they would not resolve the continuing financial questions.
Barrie was also busy throughout 1975 creating the serial comic strip “Lonesome Fred” for issues of A Publication, and working on a Therafields in-house musical comedy he was tentatively calling “The Ordinary Man”; he had posted a casting call for it in the January A Publication for the end of February. He was building for the first time on his early interest in music — in the big-band music he had once danced to with his mother, the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals he had attended in Thunder Bay with his sister, the jazz music of his high school and university years, and his own tendency to break into song — usually Herman Hupfeld’s “As Time Goes By” from Casablanca, especially those lines “It’s still the same old story / A fight for love and glory / A case of do or die” — lines that may often recur to a psychotherapist. As well, he also found a way to spend much of May in England where he attended and performed at the Eighth International Sound Poetry Festival, May 14–23 — his first trip to Europe. Other performers included Jackson Mac Low from the U.S., Peter Finch, Paula Claire, Lawrence Upton, Bob Cobbing, and Dom Sylvester Houédard from the UK, Henri Chopin and François Dufrêne from France, and Sten Hansen from Sweden. A letter to Barrie from Houédard dated May 10 indicates that Barrie was already in England travelling with expatriate Canadian poet sean o huigin and planning to visit writers in Cardiff as well as Houédard at Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire. Barrie was still in England on May 27, writing a section for his conceptual book Translating Translating Apollinaire, attempting to draw with coloured pens masses of Hs and commenting how, for some reason he does not explain, the entire trip has made him think of overlaid Hs. On the flight back he wrote notes for the Martyrology oratorio he was creating with Howard Gerhart.
In October, my partner Linda sent him on a week-long reading tour of Canada’s Arctic, with stops at such cities as Fort Smith and Inuvik, and occasional sidetrips — weather permitting — to Tuktoyaktuk, Pelican Rapids, and Great Slave Lake. It was part of a three-month 10-writer series that she had arranged for the department of education of the then Northwest Territories. The other writers included George Bowering, Margaret Atwood, Al Purdy, Daphne Marlatt, Michael Ondaatje, and Matt Cohen. It was an expensive tour, but Barrie took Ellie with him, writing about it in the later pages of Book 4:
driving out of Fort Smith
30 miles to little buffalo falls
ruth rees, ellie & me
watched the water drop
60 feet into the basin
the clouds hung grey
for the seventh straight day
as if cloudtown lay in ruins above me
snowbirds flocking up into the sky
trying to make sense of the wreck around me
here in the midst of what has never known city
He found himself unexpectedly close to ancient Dilmun with its “crumbled palisades and steeples.” He had been, as throughout this pivotal book of The Martyrology, alert for glimpses of origins. As a teenager he had hoped to be an archaeologist. At Therafields he had become an archaeologist of his own psyche, of Cloudtown, and of his family. Here in Book 4 he seems to have had numbers of chance insights into both human pre-history and inevitable decay — wreckage “in the midst of what has never known city” — as well as flashbacks to the demise of his no longer lamented saints. The wreckage could also be a premonition about Therafields, and its potential to become the ruins of a lost paradise.
On his return he sketched in his notebook a table of contents for the book Art Facts and wrote a note to himself that he intended to send it to Richard Grossinger of North Atlantic Books in Vermont for possible publication — Grossinger had asked him for a manuscript. Grossinger would later write to Barrie that he was too late in sending it.
His completion of Book 4 in December 1975 saw him already thinking of beginning The Martyrology, Book 5, which would rework some of the Book 4 lines and extend its “precision of openness” into “chains” of reading that offer a reader numerous reading paths — a concept that he and McCaffery had been discussing in their TRG reports on narrative. But his progress in writing it would be slow, partly because of the continuing conflicts at Therafields and partly because he had so many other projects underway. In his notebook he created of list of these, dating it “March 26/76 /May 76,” and under each project a sublist of its parts or of tasks he needs to do. The projects included “Probable Systems” (begun 1970, he notes), “Translating Translating Apollinaire” (he dates its start 1972), “Canadian Singers and their Songs” (he calls this work “lines and variations” and dates its start 1976), and “The Martyrology.” The sublists indicated that he had written 14 sections of “Canadian Singers and their Songs,” between May 1 and May 14, each section beginning with a line from a 19th-century or early 20th-century Canadian poet. By June he would also be writing a series of poems he called “Negatives” — texts that he conceived to be film-negative versions of well-known (to him, at least) Canadian poems. The second is a “negative” of my 1962 poem “Bridge Force.” He would eventually include “negatives” of the entire eight-poem “Bridge Force” series in the final manuscript of Art Facts.
The Martyrology list included Book 5. The idea of using chains in this book and footnote numbers to refer to them had come to Barrie early, in a notebook entry on February 7, 1976. He seems to have perceived chains when he noticed that he had begun to write the book in more than one section. By October 29 he had identified three of these — a “main chain” that concerned local Toronto events, a chain that was set outside the city, and one that spanned stretches of time and reconsidered early things he had written. He wrote to himself that the new book appeared at present to be growing out of the subsections he had used in Book I and Book II, but to be creating a new form of them. Further down he commented that he needed to type the new drafts up so that he could better understand its transitions and check whether or not the work overall was cohering. Book 5 was emerging as the first Martyrology book that was not “processual,” that is, the first book in which the sequence of lines and parts was not also the chronological sequence of its composition. Not only was Barrie, by offering his readers a choice of reading paths, encouraging them to read the lines in an order other than the one in which he had written them, but he himself was sometimes writing parts of more than one chain in the same day or week. This change in his writing practice — creating numerous alternative paths rather than following a single chronological one — would allow Book 5 to be much longer than the other books. It would also result in his working on it over a much longer period.
Throughout the year the philosophical complexities at Therafields increased. In the spring of 1976 the board of directors, now self-renamed as the Advisory Board, had decided that further outreach to the public might result in financial improvements. Lea was to give four public lectures at Therafields’ Toronto centre, and hold special marathons at the farm. Members were to be encouraged to set up businesses on Therafields property. Goodbrand quotes from the board’s April 14, 1976, minutes:
There was further discussion about the need to create other avenues of income besides therapy, in which other people who are not Theradramists could also become involved in an income-producing way. e.g., shopping plaza, land, setting up houses for short term living experiences, a Willow Spa, construction company, garage, health clinic, etc.
But these projects were evidently to be done in ways particular to the Therafields understandings of community, for the minutes also quote Barrie as saying, “We are engaged in waging a war against society and are attempting to create alternatives.” And Rob Hindley-Smith is recorded as declaring that the farm should have priority over the therapy work done in the city. “He felt the rural centre is the soul of Therafields . . . he felt our perspective was wrong if we saw the Theradramists [therapists] as Therafields and the rural centre as only an adjunct” (Goodbrand 173–74). Such plans and statements of course further alienated the therapists.
In August at the farm Barrie oversaw a week-long work-group marathon, with more than 30 participants. The goal was to address both the members’ work-associated difficulties and the need to get farm projects completed at minimal cost. The group’s success was celebrated with a front page photo of Barrie and the cheerful participants in the October 18 issue of A Publication. The accompanying text was in part a salvo on behalf of the farm in the simmering dispute with the downtown therapists.
We have laboured to provide for ourselves the facilities required for our therapeutic work. In the process we have discovered that work situations which demand consistency of effort & patience in striving for quality challenge the blocked creativity in people in a way that no other therapeutic context can. Many people have gained enormously from their involvement in “the work scene,” but there seems to be a lack of clarity at large about what “work therapy” is. [. . .]
It was also an exhortation for more volunteerism.
Much remains to be done to make Therafields’ physical facilities adequate for the services it can best provide to people. There is no question that the work has to be done & that in some way we have to realize it out of our own resources. The question is how.
It concluded by listing upcoming work marathons and inviting contributions to a special issue of A Publication devoted to work and work therapy.
Although Barrie’s marathon and Lea’s lectures and marathons had all been extremely well attended, the financial deficit had continued to grow. In the previous year, 1975, a committee consisting of Barrie, Josie Hindley-Smith, and farm manager John Dean, had begun examining the farm’s financial records and interviewing its staff with the aim of having it run more efficiently. In the November 29, 1976, issue of A Publication, a front page editorial article announced that this committee, “appointed by Robert Hindley-Smith and its work . . . approved by Therafields advisory board and the Full-Time Theradramists’ Seminar [Hypno I],” had received the voluntary resignations of “the Entire Rural Staff” and had redescribed and posted the farm staff jobs. The announcement began, “What is needed . . . at this time is a new team prepared to take the Rural Centre through a new and different pioneering experience.”
In Brenda Doyle’s blog, however, the person whose position was described as “Hostess at Willow,” but whose salary, like the salaries of most of the farm staff, had been minimal, tells Doyle, “After all the interviews we were told that because of the incompetency we would all lose our jobs and have to be re-interviewed for them.” Asked to provide her “job description,” she then wrote down all her tasks — “I wrote reams — pages and pages. I was doing all of the guys’ laundry — 14 or 15 of them. I cooked three meals a day for them during the week. I cleaned the barn, kept the records, ordered food for the barn and the Willow, answered the phones, and did work for John Dean. Then on the weekends, of course, I worked steadily at the Willow. On Mondays there I also stripped the beds, washed the sheets, mangled them, re-made the beds and did the vacuuming. I cleaned the mirrors and the kitchen.” When Barrie read this, he was evidently astonished. “Barry [sic] just looked at me and said — can this be true? Barry couldn’t believe it. He was really upset. I could see that John Dean was looking uncomfortable for the first time.” The woman also tells Doyle that she began sending itemized bills to the Therafields accountant Renwick (Rik) Day, for the first time separating the expenses for Lea, Rob, and Visvaldis at the Willow from the other farm expenses.
Three weeks later I got a call from Rik. He said — is this true? The bills for the Willow were incredibly expensive. There were always beautiful meals and fruit bowls for Rob, Lea, and Visvaldis, chocolates for Visvaldis. At the farm we were eating vegetarian meals. I also did a price of meals and accommodation per person at the barn and at the Willow and it was clear that there was a big discrepancy.
Nothing much appears to have come from the reorganization except that the “hostess” learned that Lea suspected that she was angry at her. Barrie’s influence in the committee’s work was apparently limited. The woman concludes to Doyle:
The elitism and Lea’s own troubles destroyed everything that we had. After the interviews about our jobs Barry [sic] saw what was happening. One Saturday night after dinner he told me to go home. He called Rob to come and do the dishes with him but Rob wouldn’t. Barry was really pissed off with him and was almost crying but Rob couldn’t do it. He was like a brat in a tantrum. Barry came and did the dishes with me. (“Thoughts,” February 7, 2011)
The incident offers some possible insight into Barrie’s thankless administrative role — to mitigate irresolvable situations, mediate between Lea and Visvaldis’s now destructive grandiosity and the exploitation of workers such as the “hostess,” and delay the financial disaster to which their grandiosity was contributing. It was a role undoubtedly both daunting and stressful, but it was also one that his gratitude to Lea, together with his belief in the ultimate value of the community some of his companions were still hoping to build, seems to have kept him utterly silent about, even in his notebooks or in casual conversations with colleagues in Hypno I. Not surprisingly, one of Doyle’s interviewees comments, “I suspect he knew his own integrity was endangered” (“Thoughts,” January 28, 2007).
November was also the month that Coach House Press released The Martyrology Books 3 & 4 — edited for the press by Barrie himself. Although in his notebooks Barrie had been still consistently numbering all the published, unpublished, and unfinished books of The Martyrology in Roman numerals, they would now be publicly numbered in Arabic. The change would seem to reflect his therapeutic passage from the imaginary companionship of saints to the everyday companionship of friends, managers, Arctic hosts, and volunteer workers. However, the continuing contrast between the persistent Roman numerals in his notebooks and the published Arabic ones, suggests Barrie’s continuing ambivalence about that passage — Cloudtown was still not entirely unattractive.
The most revealing indication of Barrie’s inner life during 1976 comes in a draft of the 22nd poem of his new series “Canadian Singers and their Songs,” dated May 23, 1976, in his “English Notebook.” It began with a line taken from Alfred Gordon’s First World War “Ballad of the Forty Silent Men,” published in his book Vimy Ridge and Other Poems by J.M. Dent & Sons in Toronto in 1918: “day after day no gun had spoken.” After a short opening section about two figures locked in boredom and hatred, Barrie abruptly segued to what appears from its internal references to be quite personal material. He writes about being in an Osborne Street barbershop during his teen years — Osborne being the nearest commercial street to his 1957–60 Winnipeg homes — and reading the Police Gazette. In it he encounters seemingly “endless” stories of young men who shoot their fathers, for no apparent reason, and finds himself becoming interested, and wondering how strong his own emotions would have to be for him to want to kill, and trying to analyze also whether the angers he’s felt toward his own parents, and the arguments he’s had with them, could have ever moved him to grab a gun and eliminate them, and himself also, or maybe take off in a murderous rampage across the prairies killing everyone in his path and inspiring lurid headlines about bloodbaths and nightmares and “kill-krazed” kids.
The section curiously combined Oedipal feelings from long ago and a therapist’s self-analysis with a parody of how media representations mock and simplify such feelings — reducing them to clichés similar to the ones Alfred Gordon had used when he wrote of the guns of Cambrai and Vimy. One can only speculate on whether the origin of such thoughts about anger here had something to do with his unconscious transferring of “all of his feelings for his mother to Lea” that Doyle will remark on in her October 31, 2010, blog.
A common way of dealing with anger, and avoiding outwardly directed violence, is depression — a way that is arguably more ethical but equally self-destructive. For years this had been Barrie’s way — before he came to Lea in 1963 and 1964. In the poem’s next section he wrote about how his Police Gazette thoughts and fantasies had later changed, how he had imagined that he would die young, perhaps a suicide at age 18 like the poet Thomas Chatterton, killing himself rather than others, and leaving behind such well-fashioned and “exquisite” poems that all would lament his death, the newspaper headlines would offer different clichés, and awards would be thrown after him into his grave.
These lines offered a potentially lethal fantasy of self-pity and narcissism, together with an angry desire for recognition that recapitulated Barrie’s familiar feelings that Ma and Pa never listened to him, and still in the 1970s hadn’t appreciated his texts or performances. Perhaps Lea and Visvaldis were not listening to his advice now. The lines also connected to his early fears that he might, on a whim, kill himself, or in despair wander carelessly into traffic.4 As well, they indirectly alluded to his fears in 1971 that he would be attacked for having won his Governor General’s Award — that the only awards he could actually be seen to deserve would be ones guiltily tossed after him. Had he outgrown these feelings? Had they been reawoken?
He continued the poem, writing that 15 years after this self-pitying fantasy, despite having published numerous poems and won various awards, he still wonders about the angers that he still remembers. He wonders whether the new poems that he writes defuse those angers, like emptying a gun of its cartridges, or are they part of a game of Russian roulette in which one cylinder still offers a violent end? — and offering as well headlines he could never read and talk-show comments about a nice kid who wrote bizarre poems. Moreover, he concludes, he’ll never know which was the answer — an emptied gun or a lethal cylinder.
In the overall context of Barrie’s writing, it’s not a particularly complex or innovative poem — although he did give it a red checkmark in his notebook. It’s more a poem by the old melodramatic Barrie than by the later word-questioning bpNichol. The radio talk-show voice could be his mother writing that letter in 1973 — nice kid, but sure writes strange poems. Poems that are expressions of anger — even passive-aggressive poems such as “Streetsinger” — are rare in Barrie’s post-1970 work, although his prose often bristles with desperation and rage, particularly the John Cannyside and Phillip Workman texts he was still trying to complete. Russian roulette? Possibly he was playing that game in his willingness to write books that could be misread, in Scobie’s words, as “forbiddingly difficult and almost defiantly quirky.” Whatever his preoccupation with awards or parental approbation, Barrie had never courted either — never cut his hair to please his father, written prose that could garner a Booker, or even poetry that could interest a jury that lacked a Warren Tallman. Barrie had never wanted to be regulated or socially constrained or compromised — the unspoken goals of juries and their promises of awards, and too often both of parents and employers. “We are waging a war against society.” I think, however, that if he had returned to this poem he might have at least altered the last line — a line that may be correct about who can read obituaries but seems glibly pessimistic about his own capabilities for self-knowledge.