21. Unable to Rest
When a writer is most strongly engaged with what he is doing, as if struggling for his identity within the materials at hand, he can show us, in the mere turning of a sentence this way or that, how to keep from being smothered by the inherited structuring of things, how to keep within and yet in command of the accumulations of culture that have become a part of what he is.
— Richard Poirier, The Performing Self, xiii
Barrie would spend much of 1983 getting accustomed to being primarily a freelance writer. He applied to join the Performing Rights Association of Canada, listing “Phillip Workman,” “bpNichol, “B.P. Nichol,” and “Barrie Nichol” as pseudonyms. He set aside time, July 11–August 8, for the rehearsals of the play he and Marye Barton were beginning to write — now provisionally titled “Tracks”1 — for the Cobourg theatre. He discussed with his lawyer the contract for “Tracks,” and with both his lawyer and his accountant Renwick the negotiations for the sale of a second accumulation of his manuscripts to Simon Fraser.2 He finished three new children’s books with Black Moss Press, Once Upon a Lullaby (published that spring in editions totalling 13,000 copies), The Man Who Loved His Knees, and To the End of the Block, and prepared to pass two weeks in New York in April watching the production of his first Fraggle Rock script. In February he wrote about some of this work to his father, telling him that he had “lots” going on, and that his finances were healthy, but was unlikely to have enough travel money or time that year to be able to take another trip to the West. It was only with difficulty that he could accommodate a request from Roy Miki to speak in early July on “poetry and the sacred” at a colloquium Miki was organizing at Simon Fraser University. Miki managed to find enough money to expand Barrie’s visit into a more lucrative week-long residency.
For the remainder of the year Barrie would mention in almost every letter he wrote how hard he was working, and sometimes how little time he had for writing poetry. In May he told David W. Harris that he had been “overly” immersed in writing, teaching, and trips to readings. He told Bill Griffiths that his editing work for Coach House had been delayed by the demands of his own writing and the need to make a living for his little family. He told David Phillips that what with the Fraggle Rock scripts and the Cobourg play for the past seven months his typewriter had been “smoking.” In June he asked Roy Miki to tell his graduate student Irene Niechoda, who was hoping to create a source-book to his Martyrology, Book I and Book II as her M.A. thesis, that it was only writing that was keeping him from writing to her. He told Judy Copithorne that he was finding little time to work on The Martyrology, that he was mostly working on scripts, which he was enjoying, in order to earn money to support himself, Ellie, and Sarah. In October he would tell the editor of Dandelion that he was not currently writing a lot of poetry. His life was further complicated in June when Sarah was hospitalized with a puzzling illness, creating anxieties that only some tests, months later, would dispel.
It was also complicated when, at the Coach House Press editorial board meetings, the recently appointed Sarah Sheard moved to limit the number of books Barrie or other editors could edit in any given year. Until this time the eight-member board had aimed to publish every year approximately 20 titles, two each chosen individually by the members and four by the board collectively from unsolicited manuscripts. But several of the members had often had difficulty finding manuscripts that they liked. Rather than see the press fall short of its 20-book goal, Barrie would regularly volunteer to find and edit extra titles. Sheard’s proposal puzzled Barrie — why would she want to curtail his generosity? Why were David Young and his old friends Stan Bevington and Michael Ondaatje supporting her? He wrote to Copithorne on June 27 that Coach House was going through some bizarre upheaval that he couldn’t figure out.
In July he received an invitation to read at the University of Hawaii, and again replied by pointing out how inflexible his current activities had made his schedule. He had a nine-reading, nine-day promotional tour booked for August for his novel Still and at least two weeks in September taken up by the shooting of his second Fraggle Rock script — which meant that he’d be working his buns off in the rest of September. Meanwhile, since his return from his Simon Fraser residency he, Ellie, and Sarah had been living in Cobourg for the rehearsals and opening of Tracks. Despite this being a working summer, Barrie had found small city life relaxing, and had written to his father that they might someday move to Cobourg, where housing was astonishingly cheap. However, in September, despite all his other commitments, he accepted Gwen Hoover’s invitation to join the Canada Council’s Committee on Public Readings and attend several Ottawa meetings a year.
Later that fall some of his financial worries would be diminished, although without any increase in the time available for his working on projects such as The Martyrology or “An Idiomatic Tale.” His fellow Therafields directors succeeded at last in fully retiring the corporation’s indebtedness; Barrie would be able to write to his British friend Bill Griffiths on October 23, 1983, that all of his savings had been inaccessible for the past two years because of various legal complexities, but now matters had finally been sorted out. He was at last free of his remaining Therafields connection. He had had two more Fraggle Rock script proposals accepted, his fifth and sixth. He also had received an invitation from Ottawa-based MSN-TV to submit script proposals for its animated series, The Raccoons. Barrie had replied by sending the requested resumé and script proposal, but suggested as well that because of Fraggle Rock he might have a “time problem.” Nevertheless, in January 1984 he would send Fraggle’s Jerry Juhl two further script ideas.
To facilitate undertaking all these new freelance projects Barrie had bought his first computer, an Apple IIe, the previous March. In his letter of October 23, 1983, to Griffiths he had enclosed a small visual poem that he had created by playing with its Gutenberg word-processing program, and mentioned that he was now also stealing bits of time to learn Apple’s programming language, Apple Basic. Barrie’s computer play and study of Apple BASIC would enable him to create by the middle of 1984 a suite of twelve “kinetic” visual poems — ones written as computer programs that generated changing formal arrangements of words and letters on a computer screen. In September 1984 he would publish through Underwhich Editions 100 numbered copies of these “digital” poems, under the title First Screening, on 5.25 inch floppy diskettes — viewable, however, only on an Apple IIe. But because of lack of time, changing technologies, and anxiety that he was already not working enough on more personally important projects such as The Martyrology and the ever-languishing Cannyside narrative, he would never add to this remarkably pioneering attempt at computer-programmed poetry.3
In February 1984 he made his long-awaited reading trip to Hawaii and managed to free up time to spend a week there. Here he did extensive revisions to the “In the Plunkett Hotel” section of The Martyrology, Book 6 and drafted “Hour 26” of its “Book of Hours.” On February 26, he mailed the former to Scobie for possible publication in The Malahat Review, and gave him a summary of how much he had recently accomplished. He was working hard on Fraggle Rock scripts, he told Scobie, had done a really big revision of his first children’s book, Moosequakes, and had completed the sixth section of Martyrology, Book 6, “The Grace of the Moment.” He had only two more hours to write for “The Book of Hours,” and then he would have a complete version of all of Martyrology, Book 6. Entire, finished, he added, to emphasize how pleased he was, and that he’d actually sketched a possible title page for Martyrology, Book 7. But he wanted to have all the parts of Martyrology, Book 6 published — in magazines or booklets — before it appeared as a gathered work and was having, he wrote, good luck with that too.
All this productivity, however, was partly accomplished by avoiding writing letters. A number of Nichol letters were sent out that month, but almost all were written by Ellie, who apologetically told each correspondent that bp was extremely busy. Another silence in Barrie’s writing in these months concerned Visvaldis, who had jumped to his death from his apartment balcony in early December. In none of Barrie’s future writing would there be a direct reference to him.
“In the Plunkett Hotel” was one more element in the “unifying” hopes that Barrie now had for The Martyrology. His various “Plunkett” projects, including his “The Plunkett Papers,” dated from the same 1965–70 period as Scraptures and Monotones, and he also hoped to make them part of his now ever-continuing poem. The Plunkett writing had begun as a factual inquiry into his family origins — dates of emigration, places lived during decades-long journeys from Europe to Saskatchewan, locations of farms, genealogical tables. The text he had now produced was a kind of metacommentary on the superficiality such research can create. Origin now was a complex and enduring mystery beyond dates and names and their implied Biblical series of begat’s:
moving reservoirs of cells & genes
stretches out over the surface of the earth
more miles than any ancestor ever dreamed
. . .
tribal, restless, constant only in the moving on,
over the continents
thru what we call our history
tho it is more mystery than fact,
more verb than noun,
more image, finally, than story.
(“Book V,” The Martyrology Book 6 Books)
The iconic Plunkett Hotel, several times for origin-wishful Barrie a pilgrimage destination, was no family Grail Castle or Church of the Holy Sepulchre. “in the Plunkett Hotel / no trace remains of what my grandparents did”; “from the Plunkett Hotel / the roots run everywhere: / Minnesota . . . ; / Vermont . . . ; / England . . . ; / Saxony . . . ”; “in the Plunkett Hotel / we became what we really are, / transient, temporal, i’s in motion / crossing the flickering division lines of history.” Wistful since 1944 for a fixed and reliable place beyond his distracted parents and their shifting residences, once believing it might be found in “family,” and its records and physical residue, he was finding it here in transience itself, and in the mysteries of motion and mortality of which his body had been increasingly a reminder — deconstructively:
singing ‘ifamly
fiamly
faimly
family
famliy
famlyi’
In the middle of March 1984 he had an unexpected reading in Winnipeg, to replace an ailing Miriam Waddington, and at the end of the month a reading in Edmonton and a meeting with a graduate class. When he returned he told Ellie that he had experienced severe back pain. He went to see a chiropracter, Mary Ann Franco, whose office was next door to the old Therafields Dupont Street centre. She suggested an x-ray, but he declined. She then suggested that he needed to try to rest, and he replied that he was unable to rest lying down or standing up, only sitting up. Most likely he had been quietly in pain before either of these trips. Like many in the Therafields community, Barrie was skeptical about treatments offered by mainstream medicine, and disliked most synthetic medications, including painkillers. He had often treated himself for fatigue and weight gain by going on several week liquid-diet fasts, saying that these purged his body of “toxins.”4 His extra weight — which in Selected Organs he was joking about as inherited from the Workman-family hips — had usually returned quickly after the fast.5 In his commitment to fasting he was quite possibly emulating Lea, who since 1968 had intermittently attempted to control her diabetes through diet and weight loss rather than medication (Goodbrand 82–83).
By August he was writing scripts for The Raccoons as well as for Fraggle Rock, but he was unhappy that the Raccoons contract he had signed was not an ACTRA one — a fact his lawyer had pointed out while scolding him for having signed it. The company, Evergreen Raccoons, was enthusiastic about his scripts, however, and so the matter seems to have been quickly resolved without legal formalities. This month saw Barrie and Ellie buy out the co-ownership in 98 Admiral from Renwick and his partner Louise, who had decided to move to San Francisco; they would rent much of the newly empty space to ex-Therafields friends. Barrie described the event in a letter to the American poet-publisher Karl Young on August 21. Barrie’s theme was again how busy and “full” his life was, beginning with how much there was to do when he and Ellie had become sole owners, and how afterward he had moved his studio to a different room and converted his old studio into a living room. Busy, he repeated.
The next day he wrote Young a longer letter, telling him that he had now written a few little pieces of The Martyrology, Book 7, and was about to start revising The Martyrology, Book 6 — doing a close rereading of all of its books and editing them in terms of all he’d learned about the overall book while drafting it. He also mentioned having performed recently with the Horsemen in Quebec City and preparing to leave for a reading in Victoria the next weekend. He seemed to be finding ways to both earn money and be productive. However, three days earlier, August 19, he had written differently to the Canada Council’s Gwen Hoover, telling her that he still hadn’t got a grip on how to be a freelancer — that he seemed always to be off-balance, that tasks seemed to come up in ways that no one could plan for.
Stan Dragland had been in touch again that spring and summer about his “Canada, A Prophecy” uncollected anthology suggestion, apologizing for his confusing explanation of it, and wondering whether Barrie was still considering it. It’s unclear whether Barrie now understood that he was being asked only for an essay on an “alternative” poetry canon, and not for an entire anthology — his reply on August 21 suggested that he may have thought that both tasks were almost equally large, i.e. that the essay would require the same identifying of poets and poems as would the anthology. He told Dragland that the scope is “HUGE!!” and asked whether it would be possible to do it justice. He said that he couldn’t be out and about doing “that” amount of research — where would he find so much time? They’d end up getting the project “out” when they were both in their 80s and far past their prime. The letter indicates the time pressures he was under, his conscientious commitment to alternative writing, and the kind of work he might have done if he had indeed lived longer or enjoyed longer the financial flexibility of his Therafields years. He had also talked to others, including myself, of someday editing an open form anthology under the anti-Yeats title “Mere Anarchy.”
That month he also returned a fiction manuscript to a friend who had asked him to publish it through Coach House, saying not only was Coach House behind schedule but that he could no longer put his energy into editing prose — that he had only so much energy, and was spreading it too thin as it was.
In November he created some drawings for a “Bestiary,” and did a little more writing for The Martyrology, Book 7, possibly beginning work on a new “You Too, Nicky,” to “replace” or be about the poem of that title he had set out to write in 1979. He also drew in his notebook the title page of a “Martyrology: Book of Sources” in which both the complete Scraptures and Monotones would be republished, and added at the bottom of the page that Monotones in this printing would be done “properly,” with all the blank pages included. Much of this activity was little more than planning and note-making. His substantial writing time that fall seems to have been taken by scripts for Evergreen Raccoons and Henson Associates; one of his Evergreen scripts he was co-writing with playwright Carol Bolt.
In February 1985 he flew to California to participate in the What’s Cooking Performance Festival at the University of San Diego. He wrote to Barbara Caruso to apologize for having to miss a meeting with her, and commented that he was not happily anticipating the plane flight, that he still had that “pinched nerve” in his back and that spending hours sitting down was not great for it. Nevertheless, he would not only take part in the festival but travel to it through Oakland to visit Renwick Day and Louise, and their newborn baby girl Morgan. In Oakland he began the Martyrology, Book(s) 7& poem beginning “wandered the streets of downtown Berkeley / all morning / the pain in my leg / so intense at certain moments i could not stand / the pain,” a poem he dedicated to Charles Bernstein.6 In Del Mar near San Diego while “climbing the hill from the beach” he continued this poem, noticing that its lines were arriving “like waves beating on the shore of some knowledge,” or like “waves of pain,” and that his “processual” poetics were having him drag not only his leg up the hill but the entire Martyrology. “Imperfection” — the implacable cause of both the entropy that sees planets be born and die, and of his own poetics — was putting all the lines of his life at stake.
that imperfection
the whole reason for such decisions
notion of the processual
or this talk of doing
to be included with the doing
hauling my leg up the hill
even as this line drags every other line with it
the whole of the Martyrology trailing behind
its failures its successes
The text had the startling tone of a requiem for a long poem still in process.
Barrie talked to Ellie about the pain both before and after the trip. When visiting friends he was now standing much of the time rather than sitting down, because of pain. He had a similar difficulty at Coach House Press editorial meetings, sometimes pacing beside the table while discussions proceeded. When he got around to reporting his San Diego travel expenses to Gwen Hoover in April he reported also those for two other readings, one in Montreal, and one six months before in Simcoe, Ontario. He apologized for having taken so long to send her these, explaining that his bad back had now been causing constant cramps in his left leg, that on most days he could hardly walk, and that it was also painful to sit down to write. But he’d had to keep the old income incoming, which meant that letter writing just didn’t get done. Things were getting better, however, he assured her. He had taken a plane to the Montreal reading he was reporting, but the pain had been so bad that he had had to return by train, renting a bedroom. He explained to Hoover that Via Rail had had nothing else available in terms of beds — just a bedroom. If the expense was excessive, he hoped she would tell him, adding that the hour and a half he had spent on the plane, unable to lie down or walk around, had been excruciating. He joked that he must be getting old, or that perhaps the title of his magnum opus was becoming his destiny.
Three days later he wrote an even more detailed account of his suffering to Barbara Caruso, while finding new signifieds in his initials. Just a brief message from the “b(um) p(edestrian)” he began, telling her that he was continuing to limp along. His back and hip were a little better but in his left leg once-dead nerves seemed to want to be reborn, and were causing continuing spasms and making it impossible for him to know when he might be able to sleep or walk. As a result, he continued, he and Ellie had needed to make various planned purchases — such as a new bed — much earlier than they’d anticipated, and had run themselves a few thousand dollars short, requiring him to cut back temporarily on the Underwhich titles he was financing. He outlined all the activities he nevertheless was committed to — a two-week trip to Europe, another to Banff, three weeks in Cobourg for rehearsals of another musical comedy he had written, the editing of an issue of Open Letter on Caruso’s work, a week workshopping an opera, and several script projects — commenting that although his body had slowed down, he hadn’t. But he had cut down on venturing out. He was spending as much time as possible lying down. He was trying to save as much energy as he could and then throw it all into his writing.
BARRIE ANOINTING MICHAEL DEAN WITH “PLASTER DE PARIS” AT L’AFFAIRE ”PATAPHYSIQUE, 1985.
(Marilyn Westlake)
By the end of April his “rebirth” optimism about his leg nerves seemed to have faded. On April 27 he wrote to the organizer of the What’s Cooking Festival that the bad leg and back pain that had been afflicting him in San Diego were still continuing unchecked. He offered a mild complaint about his accommodations: that his painful back and leg had virtually imprisoned him in his hotel room, and that it sure would have been easier for him if he’d been housed closer to the campus — but he guessed that was now obvious. This almost weekly shift from realism about his affliction to optimism about recovery and then back to realism had been characteristic of Barrie throughout the spring of 1985 as he struggled to work at what was for him a normal pace. He ended this letter with explicit hope — writing that he had “hope” that they would invite him back sometime when his body was working properly.
In May he made a substantial contribution to the satirical Toronto conference L’Affaire ”Pataphysique, a conference partly organized by members of the Owen Sound sound poetry group. Erecting a booth for his “”Pataphysical Hardware Company,” he offered for sale a company catalogue, and a variety of paper objects including Critical Frame of Reference (eight pages plus an acetate sheet), Plaster de Paris (including a plastic bag of talcum powder), Open Verse (one page of instructions), Closed Verse (one page of instructions), and Tho(ugh)t (a silkscreened thought balloon, a “thought holder” headband sewed by Ellie, and a “thought suppressor” — a 1½ -inch pin). His elaborate presentation, relatively trivial in the context of his other creations, and produced amid continuing time-demands and pain, constituted a huge gesture of support for the younger Toronto writers who were enthusiastically expanding and publicizing concepts that had been important to him since his first encounters with Dada. He was once again — despite or perhaps because of his pain — thinking of the “we” that must survive the “i.”
Also that May he wrote a conclusion to his latest revision of his John Cannyside novel — a conclusion now being “written” by the character Harry Gardenia. Set in a bar seemingly borrowed from a Spillane novel, the manuscript had four characters — Gardenia, Cannyside, Nichol, and an indeterminate “I.” Gardenia has been reading Stephen Scobie’s recently released bpNichol: What History Teaches and is enraged that Scobie has not only dared to write it but has published before he or Cannyside. Then “I” abruptly intervenes, seizing the narration, killing bpNichol by striking him with a pipe, so he can end “his” novel and get it published. Who “I” may be remains inconclusive; “je est un autre” had been for Barrie since the late 1960s a watchword quotation. Beyond the metafictional narrative highjinks, and the playful jibe at Scobie, there is serious parody being attempted here of literary power struggles — critics battling for control of an author’s meanings, authors vying for control of what their lives and works “say,” and quite possibly Barrie battling for control of who readers may think bpNichol is. At conferences Barrie would often snicker when a critic used that deadly phrase “what the author is trying to say,” with its probably unconscious implication that authors are usually less articulate than their academic readers. Parody, however, was not the easiest mode for Barrie to write, no more in the Cannyside novel than it had been in The Captain Poetry Poems.
Because of the continuing pain in his back, hip, and leg and conflicting commitments, he cancelled his August plans to participate in the New Poetics Colloquium in Vancouver where several of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets would be speaking and reading. In the second week of that month he performed in the Banff Festival’s three-day production of R. Murray Schafer’s opera Princess of the Stars, on one day to an audience of over 3300; on August 13 his musical The Gargoyle opened in Cobourg.7 On his return he consulted again with his family doctor, who obtained for him a November appointment with a well-known Toronto surgeon who specialized in such ailments. He resumed teaching at York and working on various television scripts. In late September, in preparation for the appointment, he had x-rays and other tests. He described these in an October 9 letter to Renwick Day. He told Day that he was still limping. That although his back seemed better, he now had a swelling in his foot. The swelling had begun in May, and while it had now gone down quite a bit, it was still visible. He’d had the usual array of blood tests and x-rays and so forth, and was now told that there were no tumours, kidney problems, or visibly pinched veins or arteries but that the pain might have something to do with his sciatic nerve. He was now waiting to see a specialist who could figure all this out. So, he wrote, life hadn’t been as generous as it could be. He wrote that when you’re unable to walk normally you’re likely to become depressed. But, he laughed, life marches on, and he kept limping on behind it.
On December 6, 1985, he was admitted to Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital for a CT scan and possible surgery. He wrote to Gwen Hoover on December 8 that he was out on a weekend pass from the hospital waiting for his CT/T scan to be read and his surgery to be scheduled. He had the operation on December 11. The surgeon recorded in his hospital report that he had expected to find an L5-S1 lesion but was unable to. He told Barrie that he should feel better. On January 1 Barrie wrote to his brother Bob, who had asked for his help in arranging to receive copies of The Toronto Star to sell in his small Victoria store, that his back was continuing to improve, and that even his foot was getting better. He was heading off to Halifax to spend three days working on a new kids’ TV series that he’d agreed to do. After a February follow-up appointment, the surgeon wrote a “Final Diagnosis” in which he remarked that the patient was “surprisingly relieved of leg pain.” Ellie, however, wondered whether the relief could be due to Barrie’s getting increased rest and taking heavy doses of painkillers since the surgery.
Barrie’s biggest achievement that year had been writing the sixth book of The Martyrology Book 6, “The Grace of the Moment” — especially given what little grace the moments of this year had seemed to have. It was a theme that instantly engaged the punning, swerving bpNichol:
the real ride is the present tide
pulls you out
mark the me’s
mar or are the sub
stance or text of
a life
so that even this vocabulary
changes with the pull of the present
words entering the ear or eye
their current’s currency
carries them
into the unmarked reaches of your future
poem
[. . .]
no st algia here
just the bare longing of the moment lingers
The poem was suffused with fears of death — “death brackets endlessly.” His cousin Donna had died of her breast cancer, reminding him yet again of his dead sister whom he once thought might be writing his poems.
Donna
dead of cancer October 21st, 1983
cousin born the same year as me
carried my dead sister’s name
death brackets endlessly
being ing be finally that aside
that drop in voice
notated in
death’s presence
the dread flicks past
all light & motion
[. . .]
we carry the red ribbons mark us for death
the blood of being flooding out or
leeched
brief bright ribbon we wrap the present in
this human grace
The lines offer the paradox of their own joy —
this singing is a small instance of a being
holy alive
& holey
wholly here
juxtaposed with a prescience even Barrie could not have known —
this pain words wear
carry within them like a spine
involves the very line its
twists & turns
(“Book VI,” The Martyrology Book 6 Books)
Brilliant and fearless, the singing of the poem, and the irrepressible bpNichol “joy” in its language play — holy, holey, wholly indeed — create a disturbing contrast with the implacable information that the words, rapt in their “bright ribbon,” are bringing “like a spine” to the mortal Barrie Nichol.