23. Unbound
For the general public until now, he has been largely measured by his diverse body of work, and is only just beginning to become clear as a vulnerable body behind the incandescent character he created, bpNichol, and most particularly the character of bp as the “writer” of The Martyrology.
— David Rosenberg,
“Body By Nichol,” Open Letter 14:1, 10
Despite Barrie’s optimism, 1988 did not begin well. Most of January was taken up by writing two troublesome half-hour scripts, teaching at York University, drafting eight pages for “MEME,” and curating that month’s activities of Toronto’s Music Gallery, including a mini-festival of Toronto sound poetry. In February his weakened hip caused him to slip on the ice while at York and sprain knee ligaments in his bad leg. He was unable to teach for two weeks, and — as he explained while apologizing in mid-March to writer Lesley-Anne Bourne whose Canada Council letter of support he had failed to write — he had mostly lain, sat, or limped around ruminating on how he had been spending his life. However, he had managed to draft 10 more pages for “MEME” on February 8, draft a section of Martyrology, Book 8 the following week, and put the first three Blizzard Island scripts into the mail on February 27. But his rethinking had led him to a number of big decisions.
He was going to take at least two years off from teaching, he told Bourne — so that he could have more time for the literary writing he wanted to do. The past year had given him very little time to do his “own” writing — writing that clearly did not include television scripts (March 13, 1988). He had resigned a few weeks before as a Coach House Press director, to avoid both editorial calls on his time and the various financial risks that corporate directors necessarily accept. After less than a year he was already not sure that the new corporation could stay out of bankruptcy. He had also decided to “narrow down” his television work to just the Blizzard Island series. An additional reason for these decisions to cut back may have been the large amount of travelling that he had recently been invited to do, including reading at a festival in Tucson later that month. Some of his thoughts while rethinking may also have been anxious. The day after writing to Bourne he wrote generously long replies to questions from a Italian student he had met at Turin, and then concluded the letter by telling her that her questions were all really big ones, ones that he would likely be still pondering when workers were sealing shut his coffin (March 14, 1988). Late in March he learned that his application for the Canada Council Senior Arts fellowship had been denied.
On April 15, 1988, he and Ellie and Sarah flew to Saskatoon, where Ellie’s parents still lived. Barrie proceeded to nearby Weyburn where he spoke at two workshops and drafted plans for a “Take Two” issue of Open Letter in which he hoped to have Margaret Atwood write about Survival, Dennis Lee about his essay “Cadence, County, Silence,” Lionel Kearns about his essay “Stacked Verse,” and various other writers, including Douglas Barbour and Phyllis Webb, who would also offer second thoughts about one of their early books, essays, or statements. On April 18 he returned to Saskatoon to give a reading. With Ellie and Sarah he then flew to Winnipeg for another reading and to visit his sister Deanna. Back in Toronto, he had rehearsals with the Horsemen for a Brown University performance in Rhode Island, which they flew to on May 2.
On their return he resumed work on the Blizzard Island series, amid yet more serious back and leg pain — most likely brought on by his recent travelling. He wrote to a Blizzard co-writer Andrew Cochrane that he thought he was in the middle of a new “arthritis” attack — that he’d been told that his ailments might progress this way. He told Cochrane that the pain was anything but fun, and that he was now trying to get by on painkillers — things that he had never wanted to consume. He joked that those cliché lines about age not withering and years not condemning didn’t apply to him, at least not yet (May 10, 1988). A little more than a week later, in a letter to James Reaney about “EAR LICK,” a Canadian songs-by-poets series that Barrie and Ondaatje had been trying to interest CBC Radio in airing, his thoughts turned again to mortality. He commented to Reaney that this life seemed to offer only a finite amount of time, and that it might be the only life one got, adding parenthetically that he had never made a final decision about whether that was so — that it seemed foolish to try to make a call on that until the moment arrived (May 22, 1988). But in a few days he was flying to Calgary for a week-long residency, and on May 29 was in Vancouver for the launch of the Miki-edited collection of Martyrology essays, Tracing the Paths. Barrie then journeyed to Victoria for a four-day visit with his parents. There he wrote a new draft of “The Nose” for “Organ Music,” and new texts for Martyrology, Book 7 and Martyrology, Book 10.
ONE OF BARRIE’S LAST FORMAL PORTRAITS.
(Marilyn Westlake)
Back home in June he appears to have worked mostly on getting Martyrology, Book 7 ready for publication. He was now calling it “Gifts,” and drafting and sketching the “Middle Initial Event” with which it begins. He was also consulting with McCaffery about the peculiar “base 8” numbering system he had been toying with for The Martyrology’s later books. McCaffery did not care for it, and Barrie decided to seek Fred Wah’s advice at the Red Deer workshop where he would again be teaching. Barrie was also pondering an invitation that the Horsemen had received to perform in the last week of July at the prestigious Rencontre Internationale de Poésie at Tarascon in the south of France.
He spent the first week of July with Wah and Red Deer College Press publisher Dennis Johnson at the Red Deer workshop. As in the year before, the workshop was held at Sylvan Lake, a resort where Barrie’s parents had spent their honeymoon in 1933, and where one of his uncles had played in the dance band. At both workshops Barrie found himself inside an unintended return to an origin, amid memories of ancestral memories — “re-membering” — and amidst the i’s those memories had once engendered. This time he began writing a poem he would call “read, dear,” which would become the second text of Martyrology, Book(s) 7&.
fam-ily
fami-ly
fam-ily
fami-ly
fam-i-ly
-i-ly
-i-
-i-
One of these i’s was his long-dead sister Donna, and in the seventh part of the poem he rewrote from memory a decade-old poem about her death. In the following part the “sylvan” lost 1930s world of her death confronted him with his own losses, or the bpNichol narrator of the poem did, seemingly addressing him — “you,” “we” — with ominous news.
things remembered or recalled
the way that old song refuses to leave the mind
alone
conversations with gone friends
how it seemed you would all go on
foreverie
/frag/mented / memory of /
beginnings stories of
the world before you came to be
we are all
somebody’s dead
baby
Echoes here of Donna and of Barrie and Ellie’s lost son — along with ones very likely of the also dead Lea, Visvaldis, cousin Donna, Jerry Lampert, and others — showed that this unsought visit to a past was pointing Barrie toward a much-too-nearby future. And then in the tenth part the narrator would tease him with the news that “i signs / i signifies / i sings.” Very personal pronouns were shifting all around him. The final part began as if it were speaking to him:
at sylvan lake
certain things begin
or it is another
arbitrary point from which a line gets drawn
story has its start
its impulse
to unravel
. . . .
sometimes you think you see it all in the
mirror rim
but then the light’s dim or
your eyes fool you
When Barrie returned to Toronto, once again in severe pain, he visited his family doctor, who referred him for x-rays. The x-rays surprisingly showed a clearly visible shadow across his lower spinal column, and his doctor quickly booked him for a magnetic resonance scan at Toronto General Hospital. The three other Horsemen travelled to the Tarascon festival without him. Barrie worked on readying the manuscripts of Art Facts and Martyrology, Book 7& for publication, and on preparing for a trip to Halifax for the shooting of the Blizzard Island episodes. In mid-August he telephoned me in France, where I would be for the next year. I had entrusted him with the management of our journal, Open Letter. He gave me a progress report on the fall issue, told me about the x-rays and that he now expected to have new surgery. He seemed more relieved to have found a cause for his pain than anxious about the operation.
He had the MRI scan on August 26, and was referred to a surgeon, who saw him within two days. There was a large non-malignant tumour in his sacrum. The surgeon was hopeful that it could be removed, but warned Barrie that the lost feeling in his leg could not be restored and that some paralysis was possible. On August 30 he readied a revised diskette of his Apple IIe computer poems First Screening and sent it to Dennis Johnson for Red Deer College Press to publish.1 He also mailed the final manuscript of Art Facts to Charles Alexander of Chax Press in Tucson. He wrote the first two of his “body paranoia: initial fugue” or “bp:if” poems — punning one more time on those “bp” initials. Punning also on the two bodies, the poem’s and Barrie’s, and pondering the now 24-year-old relationship between the initials and that body with its anxieties and “awkward bits” that surgery awaited. The puns brought the unfortunate Barrie and bp together in terror — “sayn’t / n’t ready” — terror that theirs might be a relationship that doesn’t “work out,” that “we” might not grow older.
awkward bits
relationships
that don’t work out
(between words &
where does fear fit in all this?
anxiety?
terror that we might not
grow older
bp of course would, and will, grow older. Around September 5 Barrie flew to Halifax for the Blizzard Island shootings, returning September 9. From there, having heard that Paul Dutton was upset about the impending surgery, he had phoned him “to reassure me that it wasn’t a question of ‘the big D’” (email April 15 2012). On September 10 he wrote the fifth of the “bp:if” poems and the instructions that they be left out of the binding of The Martyrology, Book 7& — “interleaved into the final bound copy of Martyr 7 &.” Barrie wanted bp to have open possibilities. Even if.
These were not, however, the only works he was creating. Readers of Gifts could get the impression that Barrie was preoccupied with his surgical prospects to the exclusion of all else, or was writing his last poems from a hospital bed. On September 2 and September 4 he drew ’pataphysical items — the second one titled “the shirt off my back.” On September 10 he wrote several pages of what appears to be a poem for voices, entitled “Radio Work,” and added additional sections on September 11 and 12. Also on September 12, he wrote a memorial poem for Robert Duncan, who had died earlier in the year. These are all entries in his notebook, which he used mainly when travelling. There could well be other work in his manuscript files. Paul Dutton visited him on the 12th and was moved to hear him, amid his pain and anxiety, express sympathy for the distress his doctors were clearly suffering when having to give him such troubling news and limited possibilities. However, Barrie also reassured him that “the worst-case scenario is that I will have to be in a wheelchair.” Barrie also gave him his Christmas present — a book about the Dutton name — under the pretext that the present was “just too good to wait that long for” (email, May 15, 2012). Philip McKenna recalls yet another expression of Barrie’s selflessness from this period. Barrie confided to him that during one of his moments of anxiety he had sighed “Why me, Lord.” But then almost immediately he had heard a voice replying, “Why not you, son?”
On September 13 Barrie attended the premiere of Ron Mann’s film Comic Book Confidential at Toronto’s Festival of Festivals, and at the after-party met one of the comic book legends whose books he had collected, Will Eisner. Barrie had recently created what Mann describes as a “collectors program/promotional comic book” that would accompany the film, and had also recorded a commentary on the film for CBC Radio — both as gifts to Mann.
On September 14 and 15 he typed at least six letters, most of them about business matters, but one was to Fred Wah who had written that he had heard from George Bowering about the upcoming surgery. Puzzled by how vague news about it had reached Bowering (it had come to Bowering through me), Barrie wrote a detailed reply. He wrote that after having spent three and a half years trying to find out what his problem was, he had been told that it was not arthritis but instead a tumour, in his sacrum. They call it a “cordoma” he told Wah, querying the spelling, and saying that of course the little bastard had been growing and messing up his nerves, etc. He explained that the good news, if there could be such a thing, was that it wasn’t one of those incendiary metastatic kind of tumours — once they went in and got it that was the end of it. But, he continued, no one knew for sure how much damage it had done or what nerves were involved, and so couldn’t tell him how much movement he would have, below the waist, after the surgery. He was going to have tests about that next Tuesday, and the surgery likely a week after that. It would be 12 hours of surgery, with the surgeon coming at the tumour from two sides, and a recovery that could take 10 days or two months. He told Fred that the positive side of all this was that he might soon be walking without pain, something he hadn’t experienced in years. That’d be great, he reflected. But there was also unavoidable anxiety — “attacks” of it, he wrote (September 14, 1988). On September 15 he wrote a similar letter to British sound poet Paula Claire and a cover blurb for George Bowering’s book Errata.
On September 21, after the additional tests, Barrie saw his surgeon and learned that the tumour was even larger than had been previously thought. The choice, as he said to Ellie, was either to let the tumour grow and quickly kill him — possibly within two months — or risk the surgery. As when three months old, he was choosing to live. On the next day — his last before entering hospital — Gerry Shikatani, recently returned from Europe, visited him for the afternoon; again they discussed the difficult publishing situation of visual poetry. They went out briefly to a nearby Future Shop where Barrie — limping ahead as much as walking — bought a Walkman CD player to use in hospital while recovering. They returned to Lauder Avenue where on the back porch he bid Gerry farewell, telling him that he’d see him on “the other side” of the surgery. In the evening Barrie visited his old friend Rob Hindley-Smith.
The operation began on September 23 but was so complex that it had to be paused and resumed on September 24. The surgeon later described the tumour, a sacral chordoma, as being the size of an oven roast, and its involvement with other tissue so extensive that the bones of the sacrum had to be sawed and removed.2 The extent of the surgery caused such blood loss that supplies had to be borrowed from other hospitals and a recovery machine employed so that the blood being lost could be re-transfused. Near the end all the blood of his type in Toronto had been exhausted. Barrie died on September 25.