20. Eric Von Daniken Meets
Kurt Schwitters

He dashed off comic books, hatched operas and banged out television scripts. He futzed with fiction, tinkered with radio plays and monkeyed with children’s verse. As a member of the sound-poetry ensemble Four Horsemen, he chanted and nasal-droned for audiences across North America. He favoured collage, comic books, typefaces, puns, doodles and blank pages, and had a soft spot for the letter “H.”

— Carmine Starnino, “Does bpNichol’s once-revolutionary
wordplay have staying power?” Maisonneuve, July 5, 2011

Nineteen seventy-nine and 1980 had been extraordinarily stressful years for Barrie. His son had been stillborn. He had been forced for the second time in two years to lose two months work in moving to a different house, with both moves kindling memories of the numerous dislocating moves his family had made in his childhood. Both moves had been caused by unexpected and abrupt changes his best friend Rob had been making in his own life — while also increasingly disagreeing with Barrie on the goals of Therafields. Therafields itself — a context that over 16 years had provided Barrie with self-knowledge, an extended family life, idealistic goals, employment, and a host of friendships among both its therapeutic and artistic communities — had been slowly imploding. His numerous friends from Hypno I were now regarding him as little more than an impediment to their hopes of disentangling themselves from “the Smiths” and a financially impractical rural community. Illness had so reduced Lea’s spirit and intellect that she was no longer recognizable as the charismatic healer who had once saved him. Yet Barrie was continuing to treat all those involved with civility and attempted understanding, and to describe the Therafields’ changes mildly to others. Therafields is enduring even more turmoil than ever, he had written in a letter to his sister in July 1980, elaborating that huge changes seemed to be imminent, making all parts of his life unpredictable. And he wrote that he had continued to move his various writing projects forward, although never at the pace he desired. In February 1981 he wrote a letter to Steven Smith about Underwhich Editions sales and revenue. On top of everything else he was managing Underwhich during Smith’s absence in Britain. Barrie wrote that beyond such mundane matters his own life rushed on, that there wasn’t enough time in any of his days, and that if he became tired he worried that he was wasting time.

Much of his creative time in the first part of 1981 was spent preparing for the “Clouds and Water” exhibition of paper works and sewn cloth visual poems that he and Ellie would hold in March at the Vivaxis café. The highlights of the exhibition were the multicoloured cloth works, which Barrie designed and Ellie sewed as partly quilted wall hangings, some as large as 40 x 30 inches. In February he also managed to find time to draft “Hour 14” of “The Book of Hours” and “The Tonsils” for “Organ Music.” That month the six volumes from the Talonbooks Selected Poems Series were released, with celebratory launches planned for April and May at Harbourfront in Toronto and Robson Square in Vancouver. While in Vancouver for the latter, Barrie drafted another section for “Organ Music” called “The Toes.” In June he drafted “Hour 17” during a visit with Ellie to Point Pelee National Park.

June was the required time for the Therafields corporation to purchase back the shares of those members who no longer wanted their money so invested. According to Goodbrand, to make this repurchase the board had found itself having to borrow $863,000, with the loan secured not only by the assets of the corporation but also by the personal assets of Barrie, Rob, and Renwick. Earlier in the spring the three of them had scrambled to launch various money-making plans. Rob had become a representative for Amway. As a board they had bought additional properties adjacent to the Dupont Street centre in the hope of replacing all the buildings with a large business complex. They had commissioned Visvaldis to design a $10 million spa, complete with a private airstrip, to be built near the Willow. But their hopes of selling unused Therafields houses to help finance these were thwarted by declines in Toronto real estate values. Meanwhile Lea’s health had declined to such an extent that she could no longer care for herself; Rob had to create a separate corporation to handle her affairs (Goodbrand 223). How committed Barrie himself was to the various development plans is unclear. Quite possibly he was outvoted by Renwick, an accountant, and the increasingly right-leaning Rob. Certainly, the enterprises being planned were unlike any that had ever interested Barrie. The only things that the record makes certain are that he was ethically committed to repaying Therafields investors, and determined also to be able to support what he was confidently calling to close friends his “petite famille.” He had begun considering what he might do as a writer to replace his Therafields income. For Ellie was pregnant once again, and being closely monitored for an expected November delivery.

In July Barrie had Canada Council supported readings scheduled in Vancouver at Simon Fraser University and the Octopus East bookstore. He and Ellie flew west for the readings and then on July 27 took the train back, with Barrie hoping to write a journal-poem along the way. The result was Continental Trance, the third book of The Martyrology, Book 6 Books. Barrie thought this text might be a replacement for the “You Too, Nicky” one that he had vainly hoped to create during their drive west through Saskatchewan in September 1979.

A little more than a month later, on September 16, their daughter, Sarah Kathryn, was born 10 weeks premature. She would not be released from hospital until November 28, with both parents during the interim making daily trips to the hospital to be with her. In this period he wrote and delivered a paper — with handouts — at the Toronto ’pataphysics conference, “The Symposium on Linguistic Onto-Genetics,” wrote a draft of “Hour 18” of “A Book of Hours” on the birth of his daughter and a draft of “Hour 19,” prepared and mailed the manuscript of The Martyrology, Book 5 to Jerry Ofo for him to begin creating its visual images, and mailed as well a complete manuscript of Scraptures to Charles Alexander for possible publication by his Black Mesa Press. He also began work with musician John Beckwith on the 12-minute CBC-commissioned Mating Time, which would be broadcast the next year. Dutton notes both the importance of such collaboration to Barrie, and how he brought Beckwith “a ream of obscure ’20s and ’30s pop-song sheet music” to work with. Quite possibly these new performance collaborations — with Van Loon, Gerhard, and Beckwith — were partly replacing both the various cooperations Barrie had been involved with at Therafields, and the to-Barrie disappointing Four Horsemen collaborations. They were not especially lucrative ventures, however.

BARRIE PERFORMING IN R. MURRAY SCHAFER’S WIZARD OIL AND INDIAN SAGWA, 1982.

(Marilyn Westlake)

The first sign of financial discomfort came in a letter dated January 2, 1982, that Barrie wrote to Gwen Hoover, the Canada Council officer in charge of its public readings program. He was lamenting how long it had been taking her office to process his reports and issue cheques for his poetry-reading expenses — which were often around $700. He told her that he never had cash on hand for these, and had to either leave the amount on his credit card and — at current rates — pay $60 in interest, or cash in an investment and lose $60 in interest, making his profit on the reading marginal at best. It was a complaint he would make several times that year, with Hoover soon attempting to give him a travel advance for most of his readings. Later in the month he performed in Kingston in R. Murray Schafer’s new musical pageant Wizard Oil and Indian Sagwa, and while driving to Kingston encountered near Port Hope the Choate Road scene that inspired on January 21 his beginning of the “Inchoate Road” section of The Martyrology, Book 6. In February the choral work “Mating Time,” music by John Beckwith and text by bpNichol, and commissioned by the CBC, was performed by the internationally celebrated Elmer Iseler Singers. This appears to have been one of the first new paying tasks Barrie had encountered. He was also considering writing children’s books — both for his new daughter and profit. The previous fall Black Moss Press had published his first children’s book, the collection of poems Moosequakes and Other Disasters, in a small edition. The press was also interested in him attempting a more commercial text.

In February he became the point man for a rather strange project that he, Mike Ondaatje, and Margaret Atwood had conceived. Much like Irving Layton and Eli Mandel in 1970 had raised money to give a “peoples poet” award to Milton Acorn because, in their view, he had been unjustly deprived of a Governor General’s Award when it had been awarded to George Bowering, Ondaatje, Atwood, and Barrie were setting out to raise money for an award to Phyllis Webb to compensate her for her book Wilson’s Bowl not having won, or even been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, which had been given in 1980–81 to Stephen Scobie. Timothy Findley sent them $500 and a note saying that the book was damn good. Scobie also contributed and magnanimously apologized for his book’s having won the award over Webb’s better one. In a letter to Atwood Barrie asked whether they were going to hold a public award ceremony — possibly he was recalling the much advertised ceremony at Grossman’s Tavern, complete with imitation medal, that had accompanied Acorn’s compensatory prize. By April they had raised almost $3,000, which they had Barrie convert to a money order and send to P.K. Page with instructions to present it privately. Ironically, within a year Webb would win the actual award for her 1982 selected poems, The Vision Tree — a book that contained 30 pages of poems from the rejected Wilson’s Bowl. Or perhaps there was no irony — possibly Barrie’s efforts along with those of Ondaatje and Atwood had acted as a discreet but effective lobbying campaign on Webb’s behalf. Perhaps that was at least what one of them had hoped for. All three, along with Scobie, would have understood that such awards are as much political statements as literary. Daphne Marlatt had written to Barrie in late 1981, sending him $30 for the fund, and mentioning that her partner Roy Kiyooka perceived the project as mere “literary maneuvering” that he had little interest in.

Overall, the spring of 1982 was a lively time for Barrie, as he undertook somewhat more travels than usual because of the fees they would earn him. In the second week of February he did several readings on the West Coast with Steve McCaffery. He later wrote to Toby McLennan, whose first book he was editing for Coach House, that he had just returned from giving readings in British Columbia, including Nanaimo, North Vancouver, and the Sechelt Peninsula, and then added that she probably knew how such trips went and typed the words travel, eat, read, drink, sleep more than 35 times. In March he undertook a week-long residency at David Thompson University Centre in Castlegar, British Columbia — a residency that the centre was combining with a weekend conference. Here he wrote a note about his still languishing novel “bpNichol by John Cannyside” and further drafts of “Inchoate Road” and “Inchoate World,” writing one of the latter in his notebook and recording that it had been written on the road between Salmo and Creston in the company of Stan Bevington, Nicole Brossard, Nancy Jean Thomson, and Joan Hoogland, all hoping to arrive in time to catch a plane to Calgary. In a brief mention of this trip to Page in the letter in which he later enclosed the Webb money order, Barrie complained for the first time in print of having back pain. Explaining his delay in sending the money, he wrote that it had included one out-of-town-trip, a messed-up back, and a period for recovery. The recovery period had been almost three weeks.

With that letter to Page on April 7, 1982, Barrie’s letter-writing came to a temporary halt, as did his notebook entries — although in May he did oversee the staging of a revised Group: A Therapeutic Musical for the Toronto Theatre Festival. He had been writing quarterly “Toronto” reports for the magazine CVII, and on August 7 wrote its editor to apologize for having missed the last deadline. He told her that just after his last letter (March 29) his world had exploded around him, engulfing him in a series of urgent meetings about a particular business matter. The emergency had continued into early July, carrying him well past her June 15 deadline. Because of the nature of the blow-up (he comments that he is using that word deliberately) he turned to do some intensive “personal writing” rather than resume replying to letters. A few days later he wrote less hyperbolically to Gilles Morin, an acquaintance who apparently knew the Therafields scene, telling him that the ongoing debates seemed to be in endless disorder, whether about how to change or dissolve the corporate structure of Therafields, or how to create something new to succeed it.

Barrie had actually resigned from most of his Therafields positions, and ceased working as a therapist sometime in May, and at that point wished himself fully separated from it. Goodbrand suggests, however, that because of the financial arrangements under which he had pledged his assets as security for the corporation’s bank debt, Barrie was obliged to remain, at least legally, a Therafields director until that debt was retired in the fall of 1983. The turmoil or blow-up that Barrie mentioned in his August 1982 letters may have been the collapse of Hypno I at the end of March, or the bank’s threat shortly afterward to recall the Therafields debt and seize the corporate and personal assets that had secured it. In consequence of that threat, Rob and Renwick had been forced to give up their dreams of a $10 million spa and a downtown plaza — dreams that it’s unlikely Barrie had shared. In July the three directors began laying off employees and selling corporation real estate and other assets (Goodbrand 226). Rob and Renwick had been of course following the one path they had felt most capable of following. Barrie had hoped mainly to emerge from the Therafields debacle with a clear conscience, time to write, and some way of supporting his “petite famille.”

How bad was his situation? He would describe it on May 13, 1983, in a letter to David Phillips as having begun when he and Rob, as directors, had launched an austerity program to rid the Therafields corporation of various unneeded elements, one of which happened to be Barrie’s vice presidential job. He had been forced to fire himself. The change had occurred much more quickly, he wrote, than he had anticipated or wanted, even though in some ways it was welcome. He had thus been forced to support his little family that summer of 1982 by spending savings, doing freelance writing and, he told Phillips, selling much of his treasured and lengthily-assembled collection of historic North American comic books and newspaper comic sections. Steve McCaffery tells Peter Jaeger in 1998 that he recalls “this as a time of great depression for Barrie but was not privy to the details” (Jaeger 88).¹ Goodbrand notes that the Therafields transformation seriously “weakened” Barrie’s friendship with Rob, who “had a new coterie of friendships allied with his entrepreneurial ambitions and he and Barrie would [now] meet only on the occasions when Barrie and his wife Eleanor were invited to a party at Rob’s house” (253).

That July Barrie had made another trip to British Columbia to read at Simon Fraser and visit various friends including Bowering. There, as usual during travels, he had done considerable writing — a long section of “Inchoate Road” — and thought again about his Winnipeg flood novel, “An Idiomatic Tale.” Late in the month he listed in his notebook the three writing projects on which he most wanted to work: a rewrite of “John Cannyside,” “An Idiomatic Tale,” and a “mystery novel.” His ambition to write significant novels was a long-standing one and, in the light of his success with poetry and recent successes as a script writer, plus his sense that he had now only limited time for writing, oddly persistent. His “John Cannyside” or “bpNichol by John Cannyside” project was now more than 13 years old and, with his current plan to “rewrite” it, seemingly no closer to completion. On August 7 he wrote to Bowering about trying to resume writing “An Idiomatic Tale,” saying that he was enjoying the writing of it but wondered whether anyone would enjoy the result. He told Bowering he was creating the whole narrative out of a series of images that would constitute a two-week period in the life of a family, a period in which, as one would expect, nothing is resolved. The reader enters and leaves the narrative in the middle, and “hopefully” will experience a resolution through the leaving of it. The images will be all that the reader knows about it. That’s why he’s calling the novel “idiomatic,” he told Bowering, because it’s the normal “family” story. The explanation, however, seemed to say as much about Barrie’s understanding of family, or about what is usual in a family, as about the novel. On the Labour Day weekend he entered the Arsenal Pulp Press Three-Day Novel competition, writing a text he called “Still.”

By September 1982 he had an invitation to write potentially profitable scripts for Henson Associates’ popular television series Fraggle Rock. Aware of the income-earning transitions he was attempting to make, both poet Dennis Lee and Barrie’s s fellow Coach House Press board member David Young, who were already writing for the Henson series, had encouraged Barrie to make contact with its producers. As well, through another acquaintance, actress and playwright Marye Barton, he had the possibility of co-writing a musical comedy for a theatre company in nearby Cobourg, Ontario.

But Barrie spent much of September composing and rehearsing new work for two performances the Four Horsemen were to give at the beginning of October in Nanaimo and Victoria. As usual, he was less than enthusiastic about his Horsemen role, and on September 26, after an unsatisfying rehearsal, wrote in his notebook a long and reflective analysis of the group’s limitations. Again he perceived himself as doing little more than supporting the work of the other three. He wrote that when the group had begun he had already reached the end of his interest in solo sound poetry, but had been enthusiastic about blending a variety of voices. However, once in the group, he believed, he had moved much too far from a solo position, and allowed himself to be merely the one who “underlined” the voices of the others. He had become mere glue for the group’s words and emotions, when he should have been trying to help create pieces in which four strong creative personalities collided. Instead, all he did was mask or harmonize the differences among the others, so that the group never had to confront its aesthetic and emotional conflicts. His improvisations, he reflected, had worked toward a blending of voices, rather than trying to achieve interesting discordances or dissonances — peace at any cost. He recalled only once allowing himself to use techniques or make sounds that might bring him into visible conflict with another member. That was when he had proposed a solo piece, “Eric [sic] Von Daniken Meets Kurt Schwitters” and all of the others had disliked it, McCaffery so much that he had mocked it. The incident, he thought, had made him retreat in terms of composition, so that now he would make no substantial personal initiatives involving collaboration, but instead write safe four-part texts that he knew the others would accept.

Barrie went on in this note to blame himself for this retreat, although his account also portrayed his fellow Horsemen as rather dysfunctional in their communications. Competitive sarcasm as a kind of sibling rivalry, at times seemingly designed to impress Barrie, and at times to embarrass him, had characterized their public interactions during at least a few post-performance receptions or parties. Each was a great friend to Barrie individually, but not always when gathered together. He wrote that his problem in the group had been that he responded too strongly to ridicule, allowing it to silence him when it should be precipitating vigorous argument. That his weaknesses as a composer and improviser had sprung directly from an inner need to avoid discord — that his preference for harmony had not been aesthetic, it had been personal. The note recalls the seemingly happy-go-lucky Vancouver teenager who once concealed his desperate emotions under resolute cheerfulness.² It also perhaps sheds light on his interactions on the Therafields corporation board with the more financially experienced Renwick and Rob. It makes it difficult to believe that he could have strongly disagreed with their plans — or could ever have resisted Lea’s decisions, whatever the risk to his perceived integrity or the financial health of the corporation.

After two more trips west, once to read in the Winnipeg area and once for several readings in Vancouver, Barrie returned his attention on December 2, 1982, to his “John Cannyside” or “bpNichol by John Cannyside” project. In this he was possibly influenced by the fact that an actual “bpNichol” book by poet-critic Stephen Scobie was now well underway, and that Scobie had been asking him questions similar to those the fictional Cannyside had more crudely asked of his “bpNichol.” In his revision Barrie was considering having Cannyside do a “taped interview with bpNichol” and changing the text to make the dates in the life of the novel’s “bpNichol” correspond to those in Barrie’s own. Later on the same day he pondered the idea of framing the novel within a story about its having been discovered in the Simon Fraser University archives by “two editors” who argue about its interpretation, one emphasizing chronology, the other pop psychology. Scobie had also been consulting the Nichol papers at the SFU archives.

Barrie’s devotion to this repeatedly uncompleted Cannyside project, and to autobiography in general, was now close to obsessive. Quite possibly he experienced pleasure in writing about himself in the third person as “bpNichol” and viewing himself, as his “two editors” were, from a post-death perspective. It was a perspective he had taken in his first notebook when he had speculated about whether it was offering much of value to a future biographer. Perhaps unconsciously he did not want ever to finish “Cannyside.” In it “bpNichol” was much more clearly a fiction than it was in Barrie’s everyday life in which his friends usually thought of “Barrie,” “bp,” “beep,” and “beeper” as constant and interchangeable beings. But Barrie seems in the “Cannyside” projects to know and enjoy the fact that he has invented “bpNichol” — and to sometimes tease or mock himself for having done so. Of course he had also invented “bpNichol” as part of his struggles to reinvent and save “Barrie Nichol” — but he never appears to joke about that. Most recently he had used the third person to write the cover blurb for bpNichol’s The Martyrology, Book 5, which would be released in December 1982 by Coach House: “in The Martyrology, Book 5 bpNichol maps his own life in the present, and the saints and giants who inhabit his imagination’s past.”

Barrie’s parents flew to Toronto and stayed with him, Ellie, and Sarah over Christmas. It was the first time they had visited him. When they left he began drafting his first Fraggle Rock proposal, “Invasion of the Rat People” — a title that he had almost certainly chosen before their visit, which had gone unexpectedly well for all parties. He wrote David W. Harris (now calling himself David UU) on January 17 of the new year that this had been the first Christmas he had spent with his parents in 20 years, and that his Still had won the Three-Day Novel Contest.