18. Strange Years
Engendering, directing, and sustaining the narrative inquiry, an autobiographer’s questions are at the heart of his enterprise. While they begin by impelling his narrative, they frequently end by characterizing it. . . .
— Donna Perreault,
“What Makes Autobiography Interrogative?”
Biography, 13:2. 130
Nineteen seventy-seven opened with intense activity at Therafields. Plans were being made for two artists’ marathons, a “couples marathon” hosted by Lea and open to non-members of Therafields, a Florida investors meeting, a nutrition workshop partly conducted by Barrie’s brother Don, various week-long house group retreats at the Therafields house in Florida, a “Summer Community Feast” in June, a work marathon in July, two open marathons overseen by Lea, a large farm picnic in July, and an August dance to be held on the Toronto Island’s ferry Thomas Rennie as a fundraiser to assist farm renovations. Some of these events were designed to boost morale and volunteeerism, others — such as the two artists’ marathons and work marathon that Barrie was volunteering to co-direct — to increase revenue while serving therapeutic needs.
The first artists’ marathon was held January 2–9, directed by Barrie and Grant Goodbrand, and was fully subscribed. There were a large number of artists of various kinds among Therafields members: professional writers such as Barrie, and professional actors, singers, and musicians who performed or were auditioning to perform with institutions such as the Shaw Festival, the Canadian Opera Company, CBC Television, or with various small theatre companies and music ensembles. The marathon was designed to help participants address matters that impeded their artistic work. Goodbrand in 2010 recalled:
[s]ubjects discussed in the groups included the inability to work, the reluctance to use certain subject matters or materials, the artists’ relationship to their audiences — real or fantasized — as well as the implicit audience of the significant persons in their present and past. Sessions touched on their jealousies and rivalries with other artists, and disturbances in their sense of themselves as artists, which of course included their narcissism. This emotional material, which included the artists’ dreams, took them back into the formative years of their lives, and delved into experiences that had both inspired and undermined their art. (205)
To some extent Goodbrand’s description paralleled Barrie’s notebook records of his own therapy. The group of approximately 35 lived at the farm for the week and were given studio space in various farm buildings to write, compose, paint, or rehearse for most of each day, with group sessions held at the ends of each morning and afternoon. On the final evening participants presented some of the work created or learned during the week.
Almost immediately afterward Barrie left to give readings in British Columbia and visit his parents and sister in Victoria. Amid the increasing demands on his time from Therafields and Coach House Press editing (he was editor at this time for books by McCaffery, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Riddell, and Judith Fitzgerald, as well as his own Journal, and the revised Martyrology, Book I and Book II) his travels were one of few times when he had uninterrupted hours for writing.1 On January 28, 1977, he stood at the corners of Alpha and Beta Streets in Victoria and wrote a possible Martyrology, Book 5 passage about the buildings there. On January 29 he copied into his notebook a 1919 newspaper clipping about a great-great grandmother — he had found the clipping in his grandmother’s Bible. On January 30 his mother’s predictable return to mourning his long-dead infant sister Donna occasioned his writing the “sometimes I wonder if Donna’s speaking thru me” and “Donna today it seemed to me / you could’ve been a writer” passages of The Martyrology, Book 5, Chain 3. On February 1, his conversations with his sister and mother appear to have given rise to recollections of Port Arthur and to his writing of the “sleeping giant” passages of Chain 1. A conversation that he had with members of Barry McKinnon’s college class in Prince George led on February 7 to his writing a passage about his saints that he believes will be part of the book’s Chain 2.
Over the next few months he would rework and expand this material while also finding time to do his final revisions to the reissued Martyrology, Books 1 & 2 and prepare for publication Journal and the ’pataphysical Craft Dinner. But first on February 13–14 he had to give a reading of “the complete Martyrology” as a benefit to help pay for the printing costs of Lea Hindley-Smith’s most recent Therafields-published book.2 He was also taking a leading role in the planning of the summer feast, now a “festival” called “Love/Life,” to be held on August 10, and billed as a celebration of the 15th anniversary of the beginnings of what had become Therafields and the 10th anniversary of the purchase of the farm. A large two-colour commemorative booklet was to be printed, and a day of speeches, food, literary readings, music, and dancing planned. Most of the therapists and other long-term members contributed statements or essays to the booklet. In his statement Barrie recalled why two years before he had surprised Therafields members by calling for them to replace the word “community” with “society.” “‘Community’ tends to function as a synonym for ‘family,’” he wrote. “Hence the transfer of ‘nuclear’ feelings into the Therafields situation in the form of being devoured, of never escaping the clutches of them (which must include me since I’m the vice-pres) etc. etc.” He was addressing the downtown therapists who had been resisting the policies of “them” — Lea and her Advisory Board — and advising them that their resistance to a long-term Therafields community at the farm has been a neurotic fear of being “devoured.” He was also talking about polis — about the long history of human attempts to live socially, from Toronto to Dilmun, from the autobiographies of oneself and one’s families back through towns like Plunkett and Bronze-Age Britain to Set and Osiris, Cain and Abel, whose still resonant actions he had reached in Book 4.
Now, August 10 1977, Therafields is a society. It is a society of communities. These communities are communities of groups of friends. Depending on the quality of honesty, trust and love that flows within these groupings, between the individuals within them, the communities flourish and the society flourishes. The lacks in the society are lacks in us as human beings, as sensitive perceivers of one another; or they are areas that are not yet awakened, that need encouragement to awaken. What we need now is patience, understanding, and loving confrontation. The tools we have learned to use over these past fifteen years must be utilized in new ways in what is no longer a short-term therapeutic environment but a long-term life commitment.
Four hundred and fifty people attended the festival, and for the next few months it would be widely believed to have been a significant success.
THE COVER OF LEA HINDLEY-SMITH’S NOVEL THE WAY IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, 1977, DESIGNED BY VISVALDIS.
Goodbrand comments that most of his fellow therapists, however, ignored exhortations by Barrie such as this festival statement or his slightly later review of Lea’s books (“A Brief Introduction to the SUMMONSA TAPESTRIES for the Easily Defensive”),3 considering him well-intentioned but naive (197). Indeed, the rhetoric that Barrie used in such writing was almost unchanged from when he first began writing for Therafields publications a decade before. In the same period the language and conceptual complexity of his theoretical statements about writing had evolved tremendously — almost certainly because of the increased variety of his reading and the intensity of his ongoing TRG discussions with McCaffery. Unfortunately, Barrie had no equivalent intellectual companion within the managerial or therapist communities at Therafields. Lea’s intellect had been waning as her illnesses grew. Visvaldis, as much as Barrie has tried to make him appear wise whenever quoting him, had had at best a macho folk wisdom. Rob, although impressively literate for someone without much formal education, had — like Barrie — mastered Lea’s early views without adding a great deal to them. Barrie’s vice president position, created by Lea to insulate herself from being questioned by the older therapists of the original “Catholic group,” had kept him from having productive dialogues with any of them and placed him within conflicts that made trust and dialogue difficult. If he could have renewed his Therafields language as vigorously as he had kept renewing the languages of his poetry and other writing, perhaps more people might have listened.
Later in August Barrie and Goodbrand — who was one of the downtown therapists Barrie had called out in his hortatory statement — held a second artists’ marathon at the farm and once again drew a cross-section of artists, both professional and aspiring. They would continue to meet at the downtown centre with this group most Sundays for the next year. In the fall, Barrie also began work with composer Howard Gerhard on the opera Space Opera, with the libretto based on the idea of a handsome young space traveller becoming marooned on a planet inhabited by xenophobic peoples who communicate only by song. The traveller must, as Barrie wrote, sing for his life. Possibly he was recalling the “ho, ho, ho” “happy kid” that had been his own survival mannerism in the early ’60s. In mid-September he was invited by the Governor General to dine with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who were to be in Ottawa October 14–19, 1977, as part of her Silver Jubilee celebrations. On October 10 he received a note from his mother who was concerned that he might not own a dinner jacket.
During this summer Barrie and Ellie had been making a major change as a couple. For the first time they would be living together on the same city lot, and sometimes under the same roof. This is the “When Ellie and I moved in together” moment that Barrie will memorialize in Selected Organs in the fourth section of “The Toes” (48). Barrie and Ellie, along with Rob, his partner Janet Griffith, Renwick Day, and five others, purchased the large Victorian house, 48 Warren Road, and its coach house, 46 Warren. Ellie’s space was in the coach house, with Rob and Janet, Renwick, and Barrie in 48.
The Horsemen flew to San Francisco to perform on November 17 at the First West Coast International Sound Poetry Festival. From there they flew to Vancouver to perform at Simon Fraser University and at the Western Front Gallery. At the Western Front Barrie read from The Martyrology as well as performing with the other Horsemen. Afterward an audience member asked why the part of The Martyrology he had read “contained so many references to God.” Barrie replied, “I decided a long time ago that anything that came into the poem I would leave in the poem” (Turner [4]). The questioner was probably responding to the numerous invocations of “father” and “Lord” that Barrie had made throughout most of the poem so far. Barrie’s response was somewhat ingenuous. Sequentially reworked passages in his writing are rare, but revision — in the form of deleted or added passages, or of lines that qualify or comment on the ones just written — had been always a possible part of his writing process. His notebooks and manuscripts contain various passages that he has written for the Martyrology and either crossed out or ignored when writing the final version for the published poem.
For Barrie the references to an apparent “god” had been in some years merely an acknowledgement of a universal creative force, something akin to Dylan Thomas’s “force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” In 1976 Barrie told Bayard and David, “I was a very unreligious guy. I was agnostic, bordering on atheistic, until I went through my own personal therapy which had nothing to do with religion. But at the other end of the thing wasn’t God; the white-haired one. I just got a sense of the Universe — something that was there and was larger than I was. Sort of an animism, I suppose” (Bayard 17).
But there had been also something consistently masculine, and arguably patriarchal, about this “sense of the Universe.” Barrie’s addresses to it had always been to “father,” “lord,” or “god”; the specific holy figures he had recalled and celebrated had been almost all male — Palongawhoya, Buddha, Christ, Horus, Bran, Buamundus. In part this had reflected the male bias of human cultural history, and of languages in which one reflexively mutters “Jesus” rather than “Mary” when tumbling down a staircase. As Barrie would write in The Martyrology, Book 5, “Mother / White Lady / Goddess / the less is known of You / the less is sung.” In his own case the repeated cries of “father” had probably been cries as well to his own father whom he has clearly remembered — rightly or wrongly — as largely absent and uncaring in his childhood, unable to protect him from his mother’s depressions, and unable also to decisively possess her during his son’s Oedipal temptations. The resulting deity implied in The Martyrology has been thus much less an animism — or something that just “came in” — than a familiar Judaeo-Christian figure, with or without white hair, that mirrors the father of Freud’s “family romance.” However, “Lord” has also been often for Barrie a position in language — the “l or d” that finds an echo in “w or d” — language that for him has been almost as miraculous, and fascinating, as creation itself. In The Martyrology, Book 5, Chain 3, examining seemingly alphabetic “whorls on ancient stone” at the Lakes District stone circle “Long Meg and her Daughters,” he will write of experiencing those whorls
as if a tone were struck within the brain
rings the changes
links the chains of
thot history
mysteries that seem insoluble
the voluble presence of a silent world
The word “chains” here links the ancient stones and their glyphs to the current “chains” of his writing.
In a Canadian 1970s context of pervasive secular humanism — what my own socialist father called, ambiguously, a belief that “God helps those who help themselves” — and increasing feminism, Barrie’s possible beliefs had raised at least a few eyebrows throughout his career. In a notebook entry on February 12, 1972, Barrie had recorded being unsettled by a comment made by a woman at a party about his poetry, that he was always crying for his father, and must have a real fixation about him. He hadn’t had an answer — and wrote ambiguously instead in his notebook that those few that dare speak “you” risk being broken. In 1976 Bayard told him that she could “hardly believe” that he didn’t “have a very Catholic boyhood” (17). Three months after the Western Front reading, interviewer Ken Norris would tell him that he felt that both he and bissett were “religious writers.” Barrie would reply that there were obviously “religious content and religious concerns” in his writing, and give Norris both the “it just happens” explanation that he had given to the Western Front questioner — “It’s a content that’s emerged. It’s sort of surprised me . . .” — and the teenage-agnostic recollection that he gave Bayard and David (17). Then he would become somewhat less defensive: “But yes, . . . the landscape . . . through which my poetry moves, is inhabited by some sort of God figure or figures as the case may be, some sort of religious backdrop which comes into and out of focus, which is not presented as something you should convert to but rather is presented as part of a reality in which we are interacting, sometimes to our own stunned surprise.” He would tell Norris that “[t]hese are phenomena of reality or of living in the world that one has to come to terms with” (Miki 202 244). However, whether these “phenomena” were paranormal or cultural, or involved credence or linguistics, Norris would not get around to asking. Nor would he reflect on how any monumental poetic journey such as Barrie’s, back through personal and public history into humanity’s social origins, would be likely to encounter things both baffling and awesome.
In his 2008 article “Nichol’s Semiology of the Saints,” Steve McCaffery’s explanation of the religious connotations of some of Barrie’s writing would stay close to the saints’ linguistic origin in “the production of two words from one.” This production was “less a play on words than a play on space which exposes alphabetic combinatory language to an indeterminate number of capricious productions.” The resulting gap has created an ironic analogy to the creation of actual saints through torture and breakage, leading McCaffery to suggest that “via the saints language emerges as a surrogate for the Sacred. A saint is born by way of a certain death of meaning, a death to words” (101–102). The saints “are the agents in a game of metaphysics and theophany played out according to a thoroughly material rule” (105). Rather than implying any religious belief referential to signifieds such as God-the-father or the White Goddess, the Martyrology’s “ironic ontology” can imply only deities revealed among broken or shifting signifiers, or a belief in powers that can exist only within a language system. His explanation is not inconsistent with Barrie’s of a “reality in which we are interacting,” or “phenomena . . . of living in the world,” although Barrie also has clearly not parsed his poem’s ontology with McCaffery’s care and analytic dispassion. Or possibly the very implications he has created have unsettled him.
In January 1978 Barrie’s main writing projects would be the Space Opera that he was still writing with Howard Gerhard and the musical comedy “Ordinary Man,” which he had now retitled as “Group: a theradramatic musical,” and had engaged musician Nelles Van Loon as a collaborator and eventual performer. Back in 1975 he had conceived of “Ordinary Man” as an in-house Therafields arts project, but the retitling would make it more explicitly a celebration of the group therapy and the collectivity side of Therafields activities. He had already written three acts for “Ordinary Man”; now he had decided to reduce it to a single act, possibly to facilitate its staging in the group room of the Therafields downtown centre. He was also in one of his recurring H-obsession periods. Toward the end of the month he began sketching each day designs for various paper H sculptures, writing notes about stamped Hs, burned Hs, and paper cut-out Hs, and considering also trying to create an H or “Zygal alphabet.”
Quite possibly all this H activity had been partly due to difficulties he had been having with the current Martyrology book. On February 3 he had written in his notebook that Chain 6 of the book was stalled. He asked himself whether Monotones could be “filtered” through Book 5 as a text being reread, or being reconsidered, or being rewritten as a “negative” linguistic image of itself. Or perhaps “Journeying and the Returns” could be somehow made a part of it. This was one of Barrie’s familiar “unification” ideas but he was now considering reunification as both a solution to a writing block and an opportunity to introduce new modes of writing to the work. To “reread” was likely the creating of a text that reads closely or deconstructively an earlier text’s words and sentences; to “reconsider” may indicate a new text that responds to the earlier subject matter; a “negative” was the method Barrie had used before of creating a “reverse” of a text — a new text that has a relationship to its original akin to a film negative’s relationship to its positive print. Here was the planning Barrie Nichol at work, hoping to find new ways to spur The Martyrology’s exuberant bpNichol back to his explorations.
In March he was working again on both Space Opera and Group. In his notebook he wrote a list of the songs that he was keeping for the latter. These include: “Australopithecus” about family transferences; “Ordinary Man” about psychic masochism; “Great Men Sleep Til Noon” about narcissism; and “I am Obsessed with my Mother’s Breasts” about the persistence of Oedipal desire. Around the middle of the month he received word that he had won a $16,000 Canada Council Senior Arts Grant for 1978–79 — an award that would allow him to take a sabbatical as a Therafields administrator and devote most of the next 12 months to writing. Toward the end of the month he went by train to Montreal to give readings, and on the train wrote five new pages for The Martyrology, Book 5. Once again, getting away from Toronto had seemed to help resolve a stalled writing project. On April 28 novelist Jerry Lampert died unexpectedly while in Winnipeg at the 1978 League of Canadian Poets general meeting. Barrie had been editing his novel Chestnut Flower / Eye of Venus for late spring Coach House Press publication. The unexpected news, learned in a telephone call from Paul Dutton, moved Barrie to a further flurry of The Martyrology, Book 5 writing, in which he misrecorded the year of Dutton’s call and Lampert’s death as “April 30 77” while recalling other friends who had recently died and foreseeing again his own inevitable death, and the obligations that the dead leave to the living.
make my way thru this region of the known
join them in the un
country of my birth death
carry out this trust been granted me
those few left who see a worth in the activity
songs of praise and grief
songs of joy
flow from our pens & mouths beyond us
(Chain 3)
Barrie had been invited to perform in early May at the Sound and Syntax Festival in Glasgow — the other performers included Cobbing, Chopin, Dufrêne, Hansen, bissett, Mac Low, Jerome Rothenberg, and Ernst Jandl. Now that Barrie could be on leave from Therafields, he and Ellie had decided to make the festival the occasion for a three-week exploration of England and a visit to the Cotswolds home of Thomas A. Clark and his wife Laurie. Steve McCaffery and four other friends accompanied them for parts of their travels. Barrie did considerable writing on this trip, both on his own and in collaboration with McCaffery, with the quickly forming intention of creating the collaborative book In England Now that Spring. McCaffery travelled with them to Glasgow and the Lake District and to London, where he and Barrie had readings at Canada House, before McCaffery left to visit his parents in Yorkshire. Barrie, Ellie, and two of the others drove west through Salisbury, Stonehenge, and Glastonbury to a cottage they had rented in Falmouth, Cornwall, from which they visited Land’s End and various stone circles in Cornwall. Barrie and Ellie then visited the Clarks in the Cotswolds before driving to Bath and Avebury. Having already written in The Martyrology extensively about early humanity, from Buddha to Gilgamesh, and being strongly curious about origins whether familial or cultural, Barrie was especially focussed on Bronze Age and Roman remains. In his notebook he made a list of the stone circles he had either visited or hoped to visit. His various draft poems, which include “The Martyrology Book 5 Chain 0,” contemplated ancient copper mines, the fifth century kingdom of Rheged in Cumbria, Merlin’s Cave near Glastonbury, the Nine Maidens plinths in Cornwall, and the stone rings at Avebury. Particularly at the latter two sites he wrote of feeling in the presence of spirituality. At the three circles of the Nine Maidens at Bodmin Moor he wrote:
i am turning and turning
o o o
amid the birds singing & the flowers blooming
circling under the sky
under the yellow heat of the sun
circling and turning from the many into the one
into the many many names by which we’ve known you
Mother/Father in the vast beyond
unwritable glyph
ungraspable conception
one of the many-named-one i name you
sky & sun & wind & allness
i invoke you on this lonely moor
. . .
i name you All & i invoke you
(In England Now that Spring, np)
Perhaps because the plinths are known as maidens, there was unusual awareness here, for Barrie, of the gender ambiguity of the divine — is god, or the universe, a woman, or beyond gender? However he did not include this 24-line passage in his Bodmin Moor writing in The Martyrology, Book 5. Later at Avebury, where he experienced a similar “animist” awareness of stones and birds, he reverted to his usual “Lord” shorthand.
listened to you whisper Lord
among the stones
between the calls of birds
the dull roar of traffic
the not quite silent moments that come
your voice hums again
as it must have always
a maker who spawned makers
raised these temples for you
gestures of their awe
i’ve only words
gestures of my all
record my awe of you
my love
for what it’s worth
i name the places where i found you
(In England Now that Spring, np)
He would include a shorter version of this passage in The Martyrology, Book 5, Chain 2. The two versions are roughly contemporaneous with ones Daphne Marlatt will write in Avebury in June 1981, in which — following both Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and recent anthropological research — she will experience the stone monument as one built for a mother goddess, as it plausibly could have been.4 Even though Barrie’s Book 5 will be dedicated once again to Lea, it was a father that Barrie was continuing to seek, perhaps unconsciously,5 much like Marlatt, with her own unusual family history, would be seeking a lost and betrayed mother.
When they returned to Canada, McCaffery began work on the Eleventh International Sound Poetry Festival, which he, Steven Smith, and sean o huigin were organizing for October 14–21. Barrie and McCaffery began editing the 112-page catalogue that they had agreed to produce for the festival. As well, they began assembling the manuscript of In England Now that Spring, which Aya Press would publish the next year. Barrie himself resumed editorial work for Coach House where in 1978–79 he planned to see published books by o huigin, David Phillips, Richard Truhlar, and Paul Dutton, as well as his own novel Journal.
And Barrie returned to the ongoing Therafields crisis, where four fundraising marathons were planned for the summer, including another eight-day artists’ marathon to be overseen by Goodbrand and him, August 6–13. In June there was an acrimonious meeting of the Advisory Board, during which the downtown therapists were accused of paranoia and of being lacking in moral courage and honesty, and Barrie spoke of a cynicism that is “emanating from the concerns about money” (Goodbrand 212). Later in the year the Hypno I therapists who had invested in the farm 10 years before, and who now wished mostly to disassociate themselves from it, were bought out by the Therafields corporation. They then reinvested much of the money jointly with the corporation to purchase houses for themselves near the downtown Therafields centre — causing the residents of the farm to feel justified in embarking on an expensive renovation of the farmhouse. All of these transactions put Therafields further into debt.
Amid these events and developments Barrie managed to arrange the founding of another small press — Underwhich Editions. Several of his writer friends were publishing under their own small press imprints — Michael Dean (Wild Press), Richard Truhlar (Phenomenon Press and Kontakte), Steve McCaffery (Anonbeyond Press) — much as Barrie had been intermittently publishing under grOnk. Barrie thought that by combining these various presses into one they could at least improve distribution, be able to help each other with design and production, and have an annual catalogue. Each “editor” would continue to finance whatever he published. It was another generous Barrie initiative, in as much as grOnk was by far the most prolific and best known of the presses and would benefit the least from the consolidation. The resulting press, Underwhich Editions, founded at a meeting Barrie organized of Dean, Truhlar, McCaffery, Paul Dutton, Steven Smith, Brian Dedora, and John Riddell, went on between 1978 and 2000 to publish almost 90 titles. Two of the first would be Rafael Barreto-Rivera’s Here It Has Rained, financed by Barrie, and Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited and financed by Barrie and McCaffery.
In the fall the sound poetry festival and Four Horseman rehearsals for their performance there occupied much of Barrie’s time. He attended every event and spent as much time as possible with the visiting poets. Immediately after, however, he and Ellie had to begin packing their possessions, including his meticulously organized book and comic collections, to prepare for a move to another house. After little more than a year, the co-owners had decided to sell 46 and 48 Warren Road because Rob Hindley-Smith and Janet Griffith were separating due to his involvement with — and quick marriage to — another Therafields member, Sheron Fadel, who was now pregnant. Barrie, Ellie, Rob, Sheron, and Renwick were moving to the Therafields-owned 131 Admiral Road, while the others moved next door to the also Therafields-owned 123. Barrie and Ellie’s move was complicated by renovations that were needed at the new house and that prolonged the move-in period. For a while Barrie was understandably dismayed by this chain of events that was causing him to unexpectedly lose more than two months of time — all of December and half each of November and January — which his Canada Council grant had supposedly freed up for writing. He had been writing prolifically until the move had interrupted his work. And though he and Ellie had served as best man and bridesmaid at Rob’s September wedding to Sheron, to which Barrie had contributed the powerful poem, “Two Words, A Wedding,” and were again sharing a house with him, Barrie was finding himself with somewhat less in common with Rob than in earlier years. Barrie’s generous poem could be read as implicitly acknowledging this, particularly in its concluding lines, that the newlyweds were necessarily “wedded to the flux of life, because we are words and our meanings change” (Alphabet Game 219). Amid the chaos of the move on December 17 he still managed to write a few pages of what would be The Martyrology, Book 5, Chain 8, with bpNichol saying goodbye once again to St. Reat and St. And and punningly reflecting on mortality and the ironies of looking toward the second millennium that was now “seven thousand six hundred & eighty-four” days away:
one more round
in the cycle
a life
the poem reaches its own end
conclusion
drawn back
into the round of voices
speech and print
word sprint for immortality
‘we all die anyway’
human
counting the days until the second millennium
Between January 28 and January 30 of 1979 he wrote a flurry of letters in which he reflected on the past year — although without mentioning any of the Therafields conflicts. He wrote to British intermedia artist and recent acquaintance Michael Gibbs that it had been a “strange year” for his writing. He’d been doing things like adapting Arthur C. Clarke’s short stories to be comic books, creating opera librettos and plays, as well as writing the predictable things — poems, novels, and weird stuff. He’d been just going where opportunities led him. He wrote to Thomas A. Clark that he’d had an unusual summer and autumn trying to make writing the number one thing in his life. He told him that he’d noticed that many of the forms he’d employed in the past — such as the diary-like writing of The Martyrology — were ones that were easy to fit within all his other activities and obligations because they were either short or episodic — so now he was attempting different things and learning a ton. But it was challenging and “strange,” he repeated. He wrote to his cousin Donna Workman, a nurse who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, and with whom over the years he had shared information about his psychological struggles. He told her that he was on leave from Therafields and trying to find his way through a “maze” of language possibilities, as well as attempting to end The Martyrology before it ended him. He and Ellie were living in new quarters, he added, with Ellie upstairs and the two of them “even” sharing a phone. He joked about what amazing progress in their relationship this shared phone represented.6
Indeed Barrie’s comfort in his shared life with Ellie had been steadily growing for the past number of years, as her travelling with him to the Arctic and more recently to England reflected. The previous summer they had begun living together in that Warren Road mansion and coach house, and now were actually together in the Admiral Road house. Learning to share his personal space had been a 10-year struggle for him. He sent the same news to his sister Deanna — that he and Ellie were “actually” cohabiting in the same physical building, and joked about what a huge step this had been for him, while being a tiny one for most people. He, alas, he quipped, stepped to a different drumbeat. He then gave Deanna a much more intimate view of his recent attempts to make writing his main activity than he had given Donna or his writer friends. He wrote that trying to dedicate himself to writing had made his emotional life fascinatingly tumultuous, that it had been a struggle for him even to accept having more time for writing, that he’d encountered considerable self-doubt. He’d been tormented, he wrote, by inner voices that had accused him of wasting his time, even though he understood these were speaking to him out of certain childhood matters — matters that he probably didn’t need to remind her of.
He then thanked Deanna for having mentioned Ellie in a recent general letter that she’d written to family members, including their mother and father — implying that it was good for them to be forced to see her name in print. He complained with some bitterness that their mother had consistently tried, unconsciously or consciously, to ignore Ellie and his relationship with her — that she appeared to deliberately avoid mentioning her name in letters, as when writing to Don and Liz recently about a photo of the two brothers and their partners and saying that Liz looked beautiful and that Don and he looked good. Note the usual deletion, he wrote. He was finding this more “irritating” as the years passed by. Of course the parental non-responses had been becoming more “irritating” because Barrie now had confidence that his life with Ellie was going to become increasingly meaningful. Deanna wrote back that she didn’t think that their mother would ever entirely accept another woman in his life — an interesting reply given the Oedipal troubles Barrie had endured.7
Barrie also wrote on January 28 to his mother and father, telling them that 1978 had been the busiest year of his life. He described his trip to England, seemingly mentioning Ellie’s name as frequently as he could. He told them about his Canada Council grant, and how he was using it to try to change his life, to try to make writing his number-one activity, and that he’d never thought about it that way before. He described how he was spending his mornings writing, taking a break in the afternoon, and meeting with his continuing therapy clients only in evenings. He advised them as well that he had begun a new novel (although not giving them its working title, “An Idiomatic Tale”) based on a family’s experiences during Winnipeg’s 1950 Red River Flood.
He had actually done somewhat more for Therafields than he was noting in these various letters. Earlier in the month the Therafields crisis had taken yet another turn when Rob and Lea had circulated a tape-recorded joint message in which Rob had abruptly turned his back on the communal values that Barrie had in past years struggled to defend — and to reconcile with the top-down Therafields management of which he was a part. “Since 1968,” Rob had declared, “I think we have been constructing basically a socialist state. I don’t think you get visionaries coming out of that. I think the way we’ve been running things is to minimize risk and to maximize security. [. . . .] Right now there isn’t a large body of people that’s excruciatingly passionate about anything. . . . ” Lea, perhaps weakened by her chronic illnesses, or perhaps remembering how the Therafields project had begun from her private therapy practice, had replied, “I think Therafields should become a business.” Rob had responded, “I don’t think therapists should be employees. I think everybody should have their independent practices” (Goodbrand 213). Together they had showed themselves ideologically somewhat to the right of even the therapists. They had rejected Barrie’s “we.” Barrie had responded almost immediately in the internal newsletter Therapost:
Our dreams of ten years ago demanded, & still demand, what used to be called ‘personal sacrifice.’ Which is to say, you don’t mind doing without when you have a firm grasp on why you are doing without. Along with many urban communes of the 60s we had a vision of creating a rural environment in which we could live & work & provide for ourselves; one which recognized our link to the city, . . . & the nature of our work there.
. . .
I believe that we are at a significant moment of synthesis & change where what is necessary in order to move ahead is a reaffirmation of our goals, goals which I still believe to be revolutionary. Never before has such a large grouping of human beings worked so hard to understand so much of what goes into the ordinary daily business of living — work, love, friendship, sex, children, play, the interplay of all these things & the physical and emotional environment they need in order to thrive. But now, at the very point where so much has been realized, we find ourselves strangely divided. The larger purpose seems to be either forgotten or, in some cases, disavowed . . . . This failure of the spirit is one I personally find the most disturbing because it points to the most pervasive levels of emotional blockage. I believe, above all, that each of us, individually, must move to reaffirm why we are here, & whether or not we still support the goals we articulated for ourselves in the late 60s & beginning of the 70s. (Goodbrand 213–14)
This was most eloquent explanation of the communal goals of Therafields that had yet been articulated, but Barrie was making it much too late. His “very point where so much has been realized,” however, could also describe the trajectory of his own life. He was ready to continue to “move ahead” but would soon have to do so without Rob, Lea, and many of his other Therafields familiars.
For the remainder of the Canada Council grant term he seems to have worked mainly on “finishing” The Martyrology. In writing to David Phillips on January 28 about the Coach House book he was editing for him, he asked him to tell him sometime whether or not he was “pissed off” about the references Barrie had made to him in The Martyrology, that he’d heard from someone that he was but would like to know whether that was so. If he was, Phillips would be happy to hear that he thought The Martyrology was now finished — at least, Barrie wrote, he couldn’t foresee writing any more of it after Book 5, that this book seemed to be the end of the trail. If Phillips replied, he did so orally, when visiting later that year. Barrie wrote to Thomas A. Clark on February 10 that he’d accomplished a major change this past week in how he wrote poetry, moving from a passive stance in which he waited to be inspired to an active one. Consequently, he told Clark with some excitement, he’d been able move past the tonal habits that he thought The Martyrology had settled into, and that had been leading him to think that Book 5 was really the end, and begin something new. Initially he’d thought this new writing might be The Martyrology’s Book 6, but now he was sure it was actually the first part of a whole new large multi-book work, which itself would be merely the second part of an even larger work to which The Martyrology’s five books had been no more than a preamble.
Only two days later, however, on February 12, he had reversed himself, and was writing in his notebook that he had begun Martyrology 6, and was drawing up a title page for it that included a dedication to Michael Ondaatje for his having supported The Martyrology project “‘all the way.’” Possibly he had been talking to Ondaatje about how the new writing had been perplexing him. Book 6 was to be the first Martyrology book not dedicated to Lea. But eventually it would also not be dedicated to Ondaatje.
The problematical new writing that was causing Barrie this perplexity was section 1 of “The Book of Hours” — it was a problem because previously Barrie had totally finished one book of The Martyrology before beginning the next. He wrote to Michael Gibbs on February 27 that even though he’d “put a bullet” through The Martyrology the poem appeared to have come back to life in a puzzlingly new way along with various new thoughts and visions. He told Gibbs, however, that he quite liked the fact that the poem was asserting its control of where they were going. Later on the same day he sketched in his notebook a plan in which the first five books of The Martyrology were to be renamed “Scraptures II,” the new “The Book of Hours” was to be part of “Scraptures III,” while “Journeying and the Returns,” Scraptures, The Captain Poetry Poems, and Monotones were to be combined as “Scraptures I.” On March 12 he wrote a fourth hour of “The Book of Hours” and titled it part of “The Martyrology Book VI.” Later that day he sketched another large plan in which “Scraptures (The Books of the Dead/The Books of the Living)” would have four and possibly six parts. Part I would be Journeying, Scraptures, and Captain Poetry; Part II would be Monotones, Part III would be Martyrology Books I–5, and Part IV would be called “A COUNTING” and would contain “A Book of Hours” and “A Book of Friends.” On April 6 he sketched three new parts for “A COUNTING” — “A Book of Journeys,” “A Book of Witness,” and “A Book of Politics.” On April 25 he wrote to the composer R. Murray Schafer that the new “Book of Hours” texts meant that The Martyrology was finished and that he was now writing a new large text, “A COUNTING.”
On June 6, 1979, he wrote his report to the Canada Council on his year’s work under the council grant. He told the Canada Council he had finished his novel “John Cannyside,” had nearly completed Book 5 of The Martyrology, had written 54 pages of a new novel “An Idiomatic Tale,” devised 10 new translation systems for Translating Translating Apollinaire, completed the libretto for Space Opera, four scenes of a libretto for an opera titled “Brother 12,” 15 children’s poems requested by Owl magazine, and four new scores for the Four Horsemen, and had finished his editing of the manuscript of In England Now that Spring. He added that the biggest benefit of the grant had not been merely all the work he had completed or what he had learned while completing it. It had been an enormous, more important gift for him to be able to figure out that The Martyrology, Book 5 was finished, and that a new long work, “A Counting,” was underway, to which the books of The Martyrology would be but a prequel, and to be able to complete nine hours of that new poem’s first book, “The Book of Hours.” But although these insights into what he was writing were worth the entire grant, of even greater value, he told the council, had been the opportunity to find out what would occur if writing occupied the primary place in his life.
In a postscript he mentioned that he and McCaffery had co-edited an issue of Open Letter on composer R. Murray Schafer and that with Jack David he had selected the texts to be included in a selected writings that Talonbooks would publish, and that he was a bit uncomfortable to be having a “selected” at the tender age of 34. His discomfort may not have been as much with any undue earliness as with what the earliness could portend. Stephen Scobie had recently begun writing a study of Barrie’s life and writings for the Talonbooks’ New Canadian Criticism Series. When Barrie had heard the news he had written to Scobie, on March 27, 1979, that it all seemed very strange. To have books written about himself, and selected poems published, when he was a mere stripling of 34, and still at least 35 years from heaven. Did it mean that death was just around the corner? he asked. A very cosy corner?