introduction
1. This debate occurred in issues 2 and 4 of the journal, with Coleman’s letter being published in issue 5.
2. Nichol helped organize and host the Eleventh International Sound Poetry Festival in Toronto in October 1978.
3. Nichol’s interest in the work of French Dadaist poet Alfred Jarry, who had defined ’pataphysics as “the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments” (Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, 669), led him in the 1970s to imagine the founding of a Canadian ”pataphysics (with the double apostrophe intended to denote its Canadianness), which he helped “document” in issue 4:6-7 (Winter 1990–91) of Open Letter. The issue was co-edited by Steve McCaffery and him as the “Toronto Research Group.” That interest was manifested again on November 20–21, 1981 in Michael Dean and Richard Truhlar’s The Symposium of Linguistic Onto-Genetics, the papers of which Nichol published in grOnk Final Series, Number 5 (1985).
4. The manuscripts of all these works, together with the notebooks in which many of them were first outlined, are in the Contemporary Literature Collection of the Special Collections department of Simon Fraser University’s W.A.C. Bennett Library.
5. This overlapping and confusing numbering of notebooks seems to have resulted partly from his frequent travels, particularly those to the Therafields Florida properties in the 1970s. His main notebooks were large and hard covered. He used them at home, at the Therafields farm, and while travelling — if he remembered to take the current one with him. If he did not remember, he would buy small a soft cover booklet in which to write while away, and apparently guess at its number in his “small” notebook series.
6. In a June 1968 note titled “Further,” Barrie cites R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience (Miki 2002 25) about how to create a “history” of phenomena. Laing writes in the opening chapter, “My experience and my action occur in a social field of reciprocal influence and interaction. I experience myself, identifiable as Ronald Laing by myself and others, as experienced by and acted upon by others, who refer to that person I call ‘me’ as ‘you’ or ‘him,’ or grouped together as ‘one of us’ or ‘one of them’ or ‘one of you.’” Such ideas would not only not only have been contributing to Barrie’s growing sense of the importance of community at this time but also to his later understandings of the ‘repicrocal’ relationship between ‘me’ and ‘we.’
7. One of Ellie Nichol’s principal objections to this book is that it takes seriously Barrie’s various declarations that much of his work is built on autobiography. She has indicated to me that she believes that all of his seemingly autobiographical writing was fictional, which of course it would be in the sense that all autobiographies, like all understandings of “who we are,” are acts of self-imagining and self-construction.
Chapter 1: Birth, Death, and Life, 1944–48
1. I interviewed Deanna at her home in Langford, British Columbia, on February 5, 2011. All quotations are from this interview. My impression throughout was that Deanna does not see her birth family as particularly unusual or her mother as having been especially unhappy. Barrie’s recollections of his parents seem to be, in her view, particular to him and quite possibly to his position as the youngest in the family, and have little connection to how the parents actually were.
2. In conversation about “The Vagina” Barrie would also recall the baths light-heartedly, sometimes quipping about them being among the more “steamy” episodes of his childhood.
Chapter 2: H a Section
1. Wildwood Park was a planned community modelled by its developers on the Radburn, New Jersey, experiment of 1929 as a community for the age of the automobile. Many of the Radburn ideas have been retained by later subdivision planners — self-contained neighbourhood units on crescents or cul de sacs, and the elimination of through traffic, although not in as radical a way as in Radburn or Wildwood. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Radburn,_New_Jersey
2. See for example Quentin J. Schultze and Robert Woods, Understanding Evangelical Media. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008. 194, or Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics. New York: Harper, 2000.
3. Recurrences such as this, or those of his Red River Flood narratives, suggest the considerable extent to which “The Autobiography of Phillip Workman by bpNichol” is autobiographical of Barrie.
Chapter 3: Port Arthur, 1953–57
1. The adjoining Ontario cities of Port Arthur and Fort William at the western end of Lake Superior became amalgamated as Thunder Bay in 1970.
2. In 1987 he told interviewer Flavio Multineddu that “in certain sections of The Martyrology I’ve been talking about my personal life; I’ve been talking about things that happened to me personally: that letter ‘i’ sometimes is me and sometimes on the other hand it clearly isn’t. One of the things I like best about The Martyrology is that ‘i’ reads as my ‘eye’ whether I’m talking about my life or something which is really fictional” (6). Punster Barrie would have been aware of the multiple meanings that word “really” was carrying.
3. Stein wrote several “autobiographies” of others, including the extremely “we-full” Everybody’s Autobiography.
4. A remark he makes in his 1969 notebook essay “Comics as Myth,” that the Oedipus myth continues to be “interesting” “because we’d all like to get into our mothers” suggests that one result of his therapy will be that he manages to forgive himself for his Oedipal desires by ascribing them to all men — or at least to all men who were poets. He wrote, “In fact, if we were to agree with [Edmund] Bergler, we’d have to say that by definition a poet is a mother-lover” (Peters 83). The remark indicates one of the ways in which Barrie intended the title of his first sound poetry recording, Mother Love, to be read.
Chapter 5: Vancouver, 1960–64
1. Paul Huba had died in 1959 at age 46, from a lung condition, believed to have been silicosis and caused by his art. Two of his larger works, a sculpture in red granite titled “The Postman,” and an untitled ceramic mural, are on permanent display at the Vancouver Post Office, 349 West Georgia Street.
2. Creeley’s statement, quoted in Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” (Human Universe and Other Essays 52), had been “Form is never more than an extension of content.”
Chapter 6: Lea or Dace
1. Barrie tells Niechoda that it took him four years to overcome his “compulsive” attraction to Dace following their separation in 1966. During the first three of these years he was conceiving and writing “For Jesus Lunatick,” first published in August 1969 as part of Two Novels. Barrie’s other writings for or about Dace include the visual poems “Bouquet for Dace,” “letter to a loved one,” and “The End of the Affair,” all in the 1967 British edition of Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer, and reprinted in the 2004 Coach House Books edition edited by Nelson Ball.
Chapter 7: Becoming bp
1. Among the papers Barrie left with my late partner when she was acting as his literary agent in the early 1970s are three carbon pages of a book manuscript dedicated to Sybil & Dezso Huba “who got me thru to here.” It is “by bpNichol” and titled “poems for the end of summer”; the table of contents lists 14 poems including “1335 comox avenue” and “fourth letter to barb shore.” Sybil Huba does not appear to have written to Barrie except in 1964.
2. Barrie would encounter such misprisions of his writing name throughout his career, the most amusing being a letter — a response to telephone inquiry he had made — addressed to “Mr. B. Peanuckle.” One of my last mementos of him is a White Swan paper towel that was lying on my dining room table when we were talking and joking in the spring of 1988 about the base-8 numbering system he was considering adopting for the books of The Martyrology. (“8” was for him the numerical version of H — a resonant figure that looked the same from front or back, whether right-side-up or upside-down.) On the paper towel he printed the results of our jests: “Book (10)8” and then, centred below, a self-satirizing “bp(sic)Nichol” and then below that a “[bp(sic)]sic.”
3. In his 1961 essay “Ideas of the Meaning of Form,” which he had quoted from during his summer lectures that year in Vancouver, Duncan had proclaimed that poets should no longer aim to write as masters and create “masterpieces” but only to record “testimony”; that poets’ only “mastery” should be in being “obedient to the play of forms that makes a path between what is in the language and what is in their lives”(61) — an extremely apt description for much of the middle and later books of The Martyrology. Barrie mentions to Flavio Multineddu, in his 1987 interview, reading Olson’s actual essay, “Against Wisdom as Such,” in Toronto in 1964, during his “ideopome” and “bp” self-transformations. He summarizes Olson’s essay as advising that “we should never sit down to the occasion of writing . . . to be ‘great’: we should just sit down to write. We shouldn’t set out to be wise when we write, but he says: if wisdom comes up as part of the writing, that’s fine: just don’t do it as the first thing you set in to do” (34).
4. “Communications Therapy” — largely at Barrie’s urging — had become at this time the official name of the therapeutic approach that Therafields offered. He was one of the producers of the pamphlet, Communications Therapy, which in the very late 1960s was given to each new or prospective client.
Chapter 8: Ideopoet
1. Barrie had probably been reading Williams’s contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a gathering of comments on the then unpublished Finnegans Wake, published by Shakespeare and Company in 1929.
2. The untitled and unbound poem prints the words “pane,” “rain,” and “pain” in a large column of light blue letters on a dark blue background, evoking — possibly ironically — the familiar pathetic-fallacy association of sadness, rain, and blues. The poem is also included in a plain text version, under the title “hi coo,” in Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer.
3. Barrie’s 1964–65 desire to give up “arrogance” in his poetry, to give up writing as the lyric poet who “knows,” anticipated by five years Lacan’s identification in his Séminaire XVII (1969, published 1991 as L’envers de la psychanalyse) of the limitations of the discours du maître (the “master’s discourse”) and its contrasts with the other three of his four discourses, the discours de l’université (the “university discourse”), the discours de l’hystérique (the “hysteric’s discourse”), and the discours de l’analyste (the “analyst’s discourse”). He would go on to effectively write much of The Martyrology in the latter two discourses without, in all likelihood, having encountered Lacan’s namings. Seminar XVII would not be published in English until 2007. Duncan’s “Ideas of the Meaning of Form” had of course anticipated Lacan’s comments on presumed “mastery” by almost a decade.
4. Barrie most likely read some of Bergler’s writings on psychic masochism himself shortly after entering therapy with Lea. As well as his 1965 notebook reference to reading Bergler’s Parents Not Guilty of Their Children’s Neuroses, there is the title of one of his visual poems in Konfessions of an Elizabethan Fan Dancer — “Homage to Edmund Bergler.” In the poem a diffident, possibly maternal voice — “oowhat d e a r” — is “reduced to nuisances.”
5. Dutton remembers Steve McCaffery telling him that when still living in Britain and first reading Barrie’s poetry in British magazines he had assumed that he was 50 or so years of age, much like Bob Cobbing or Ian Hamilton Finlay, and that when meeting him in Canada he “had been fully expecting to meet an old man.”
6. The letters have been published in bpNichol Comics, ed. Carl Peters, pp. 52-61.
Chapter 9: Captain Poetry
1. Barrie had also explained the concept of the book to Geoff Hancock in an interview three years before (1975), telling him that “In the mid-sixties, the most common male poem was from the courier de bois tradition. The poet comes in from the woods, slams his ax on the table, and declaims a poem about his sex life. That has its own boredom” (36). Outside of Barrie’s own Canadian English “courier de bois” would more likely be spelled “coureur de bois.”
2. See www.chbooks.com/cart/add/338?destination=node%2F958.
3. Goodbrand’s Therafields: The Rise and Fall of Lea Hindley-Smith’s Psychoanalytic Commune is the only major source of data and organizational information about this large influence on Barrie Nichol’s life. The book has some limitations, however. Record-keeping at Therafields appears to have been inconsistent, despite Barrie’s own attempts to create and maintain an archive. What archives survived its dissolution were only partially rescued by Goodbrand before their planned destruction by the officers of the Phoenix Community Works Foundation, which had inherited them. Goodbrand himself was familiar mostly with the Therafields downtown Toronto therapy operations, was only an occasional visitor to the farm, and at no time privy to its managerial discussions. He appears to have interviewed mostly fellow therapists trained in Lea’s first training group, Hypno I. He created plausible but not necessarily exact summaries of events on the basis of the accounts and documents available, leaving the way open for many who were in the community to dispute his interpretations. Complicating his task was the contradictory nature of Therafields as both a therapy business and a community. Most members imagined themselves members of a communal project that aimed to deliver a more psychologically healthy way of living. But there could be no democracy in this community. The therapy operation required treatment decisions and financial decisions for which Lea — whose money and reputation were initially most at risk — was ultimately accountable. Among those who mistrust Goodbrand’s portrayal of Therafields is Ellie Nichol, who has suggested to me that he knew little about the farm, about Barrie’s work as vice president, about the relationships between Barrie and the others whom Lea entrusted with Therafields administration, or about the viewpoints of the younger therapists-in-training, those in house groups or those operating the farm. Where relevant, I will be noting aspects of Goodbrand’s account that she or others doubt or dispute.
4. Doyle writes, “When Lea managed to give administrative control of the developing organization to her son and his friend, Barry [sic] in 1967, she was claiming it as her own business, ultimately, her family business. Doubtless she did not articulate this to herself at the time but in essence that is what happened. She was not able to trust the senior, more mature members of her seminar to nurture and care for the assets that were accruing. She had to maintain personal control. Before long that control was utilized to manipulate resources in ways unknown to the seminar and certainly to the average Therafields member” (“Thoughts,” November 19, 2010).
Chapter 10: Psychotherapy Poetics
1. Ellie Nichol strongly disagrees that there is any significant connection between Barrie’s experiences and employment in psychotherapy and his writing. She suggests that the two activities were merely parallel, or that therapy was a background to his writing much like the fact that he lived in Toronto, rather than somewhere else, was a background. The view that Barrie strictly partitioned the writing, psychotherapy, and family parts of his life is fairly common among his friends, and one that I partly shared until I encountered the evidence of his notebooks and the writing he did for internal Therafields publications. On reflection, however, it is quite odd to have once thought that someone as intellectually curious as Barrie could have refused to employ in one area of his life the concepts and methodologies he was learning in another — particularly when both psychotherapy and poetry are language-based endeavours.
2. Paul Dutton has the following recollection of Lea’s use of “deep relaxation”: “I recall Lea quite explicitly stating, in one large group gathering — a deep group, I think, or perhaps a learning group . . . that the term ‘deep relaxation’ was employed instead of ‘hypnosis’ simply because it was illegal in Ontario at the time (and maybe still) to practise hypnosis without being certified (or licensed, or something). She made no bones about it being hypnosis, nor about the [alternative] term hypnotherapy.”
3. Ellie Nichol wonders whether Niechoda may have mistranscribed when she quotes Barrie here as saying “my ma was depressed all the time because we were moving” and whether he may have said, or meant to say, “my ma was depressed because we were moving all the time” (email September 15, 2011). After Barrie’s death, Ellie lived in the same city as his mother and saw her frequently. She remembers her as lively, energetic, and witty and as a frequent storyteller from whom Barrie may have acquired his childhood interest in writing stories.
4. While it is possible that Barrie could have encountered a similar statement about releasing one’s voice in a European poetry magazine of this period, such as Zurbrugg’s Stereo Headphones (there is strong possibility but no specific evidence that he did), he would most likely have read it in the context of his earlier Therafields liberationist understandings of the voice in abreactive therapy — the understandings that he implicitly references here.
5. Barrie explains how in Hopi mythology Palongawhoya’s “job” was to sing to the creator and thereby bring “harmony” to the cosmos, and that later others had cheapened such singing by using their voices for utilitarian tasks including social deception. For Barrie the story had illuminated such differences as between writing poetry for the sake of the language or writing it for self-aggrandisement as a “wise” or “talented” person, or between using language as a poet and using it to get a sexual partner, complete a business deal, or get elected to political office.
Chapter 11: Beginning The Martyrology
1. That is, “Comics as Myth” should probably be read as indicating that there were no saints in Barrie’s imagination, and quite possibly no well-defined Cloudtown, until his discovery with David Aylward of “St Ranglehold.” The essay seems fairly clear that in Barrie’s recollections the fantasy figures of his childhood — Tracy, Catchem, Junior, Pat Patton — segued first into his Bob de Cat, then into Captain Poetry, Madame X, and Blossom Tight and only after that into the saints of his Scraptures. “These saints grew out of a comic strip milieu” (Peters 81) is perhaps as much a personal history statement as one about composition.
Chapter 12: Friends Much More Than Footnotes
1. Others from the Therafields community suggest that Goodbrand overgeneralizes when he characterizes his fellow therapists as so widely disliking Visvaldis. Ellie Nichol has suggested to me that how he was viewed had depended on who you were speaking with, and when, and that Goodbrand’s book is not the only “truth” about him and Therafields that various people currently assert. Doyle quotes an unidentified woman who cooked for seven years at Lea Hindley-Smith’s opulent home on the farm, a house known as “The Willow,” as having told her “A lot of the men in Hypno I looked down on him. On the other hand he was treated by some others as if he was a god” (“Thoughts,” February 7, 2011).
2. Goodbrand’s dichotomous view here of Therafields is also not entirely accepted by the ex-Therafields community. Doyle in her blog writes that many people involved had “different locations within the community, often with very differing experiences,” and that she herself — present from 1966 to 1983 — had “intuited changes that were happening in the broader context of the organization as a whole but was unable to fully understand or articulate them” (October 18, 2010). Ellie Nichol, who was in the same learning group as Doyle, the “Character Analysis Group,” also suggests that different parts of the community could experience Therafields quite differently from those in Hypno I or in management.
3. About these money-consuming projects, Doyle comments that “though many of the improvements enhanced living and working conditions in the environment, much of Lea’s urge for driving the literally incessant construction and renovation rolled out from 1967 to the mid-1970s was to give Visvaldis a focus and a sense of purpose within the community” (“Thoughts,” February 9, 2011).
4. Ellie has told me more than once that because Lea did not care for conventional family living arrangements, there were few — if any — set mealtimes for her to hold administrative meetings at.
5. The ideas of “The Paranoid and the Paranee” are almost certainly entirely Lea’s, with Barrie’s co-authorship restricted to sentence structure and word choice. Doyle remarks that “the paranoid/paranee issue” was one of “the things that Lea incessantly talked about through the early 1970s” (“Thoughts” November 9, 2010).
6. Ellie recalls that “Terry” was Lea’s pet dog, that it was accidentally run over by one of the farm workers, and that the incident thus had emotional ramifications far beyond those that Barrie addresses in the poem. It is a good example of how incomplete, fragmented, or selective Barrie’s recollections of events in his work can be, and how autobiographical incidents — while remaining “autobiographical” — can be shaped by the movement of language and form within his writing. An extreme example of this is his 1969 “novel” “For Jesus Lunatick.”
7. In reading this chapter Ellie Nichol tends to discount some of the anxieties Barrie portrayed himself as having. She tells me that she was unaware that Barrie was experiencing discomfort over the prospect of sharing a domestic space with her, or that he viewed this discomfort as a limitation that he should overcome. Living together as couples was not a Therafields practice or goal, she points out, and, as Goodbrand notes, Lea characterized many, if not most, live-in relationships as parasitic and victimizing of the weaker partner (98–99). She suspects that some of Barrie’s self-deprecating jests may have been his way of coping with the expectations of non-Therafields friends who were committed to conventional live-in relationships. She tells me that my phrases “bear living under the same roof” and “endure sharing the same floor” do not reflect any situation or issue that she can recall.
8. My personal guess is that Barrie may have kept the strength of the fears he had about closeness to women somewhat secret from Ellie because of his anxiety and insecurity about jeopardizing their relationship — as expressed in this “Some Description of Her” narrative.
9. See his essays “Language Writing: From Productive to Libidinal Economy” (North of Intention 143–58) and “Writing as a General Economy” (201–21). McCaffery dedicated North of Intention to bpNichol.
Chapter 13: The Meanings of Crocuses
1. The social dimension of Barrie’s therapy with Lea Hindley-Smith and its influence on how Barrie’s understandings of humanity and culture developed should, once again, not be underestimated. The following passage about Lea in the unedited manuscript of Goodbrand’s book could be easily adapted to describe Barrie’s own view in the later Martyrology of the cosmic context in which the human species laboured.
Lea couldn’t see how we could be adult and not address the question of the health of our environment of all kinds. Moreover, she was of the Kleinian school, which insisted on the necessity of reparation to mend the world in order to counteract the inherent destructiveness that is a large part of our species. She didn’t believe that we could just take care of ourselves, putting ourselves right, and ignore the context. (127)
2. See also Barrie’s attempt to gloss these lines in Multineddu’s interview, 26.
3. Although the robe was definitely humorously appropriate for the award ceremony context, it also resembled more questionable clothing being worn at the time by Lea and Visvaldis, clothing that contributed to their being spoken of by some in the Therafields community as “the royal family” (McGeachy 7), or to Lea being spoken of sardonically as “queen of the universe, queen of Therafields” (Brenda Doyle, quoted in McGeachy 9). Visvaldis tended to wear a “robe” routinely whenever in public, and Lea fancied showy dresses and beehive hairstyles, prompting their cook at the Willow to tell Doyle that at some mealtimes “Visvaldis in his robes and Lea in her fancy clothes and her false crown were like the king and queen” (“Thoughts,” February 2, 2011). Four of the photographs of Visvaldis in the photo section of Goodbrand’s book show him in a robe not dissimilar from the one he designed for Barrie.
Chapter 14: Expository Turns
1. Hansjörg Mayer (born Stuttgart, 1943) is a German visual poet and arts publisher who spent much of his life in Britain, teaching graphic design at the Corsham College of Visual Arts. He is presently based in London.
Chapter 15: Me & We
1. Ellie Nichol is emphatic in counselling against viewing Barrie’s parents as being “bad,” “limited,” or “lesser” than a “good” and “worldly” Lea Hindley-Smith, and Barrie as being first damaged by his parents and then “saved” by Lea. Her argument is that Avis and Glen Nichol were normal good parents of their time, and that Barrie’s childhood difficulties had arisen more from his perceptions than from their actions. Glen was a typical 1940s father who saw his family responsibilities mostly in financial terms and, because of his heavy workload, got little practice in interacting with his children. He and Avis had little way of understanding possible careers for their children except in terms of occupations they were familiar with. That these did not include the arts or psychotherapy was a product of the small-town Canadian prairie culture they had grown up in, not of any personal failure. It is very possible that Barrie shared Ellie’s view — even while writing the letter his mother responds to. I again think of that 1965 notebook entry that I mentioned in Chapter 1, an entry made near the beginning of his therapy, in which he records that he is reading Edmund Bergler’s Parents Not Guilty of Their Children’s Neuroses.
Chapter 16: Working Together
1. McCaffery’s remark in an essay on sound poetry, “Voice in Extremis,” about “the antisocial lyricism of individual composition” (2001 184) suggests that he might have been substantially in agreement with Barrie about the Horsemen had he openly expressed his dismay.
2. In an email to me on January 9, 2012, Dutton describes the difficulties of the Horsemen in much the same terms: “the interpersonal relations proceeded through a steady decline over years, like a marriage gone sour — or, to employ psychological terms, an unconscious acting out of interlocking neurotic patterns, which, let me hasten to add, I believe that Beep managed to keep pretty much out of. . . .”
3. Dutton wrote to me on August 5, 2011, “As well, it should be known that bp was the glue that held the group together. David McFadden wasn’t far off the mark when he quipped, at a Horsemen trio performance during the couple of years that Beep absented himself from the group, that we were ‘the headless Horsemen.’ We in fact did function well as a trio through those years, maintaining and expanding the group’s reputation and repertoire, but the quartet’s very first readings were either Nichol engagements that he turned over to the Four Horsemen, or were ones got because of his reputation. And in its latter days, the only performances everyone agreed to do were those that came in through Beep.”
4. Nichol’s story about Coleman’s role is quoted by Niechoda in note 27 of part II of her introduction, 48.
5. I offer a much longer narrative of the conflicts that engulfed Barrie and others at Coach House between 1975 and 1988 in “The Beginnings of an End to Coach House Press,” Open Letter, Ninth Series, Number 8 (Spring 1997): 40-77. Coleman’s continuing fierceness about Coach House is reflected in “The Coach House Press: The First Decade. An Emotional Memoir,” published in the same issue, 26–35.
6. It’s noteworthy that Barrie uses the same “dream world” name for Cloudtown in the “Friends as Footnotes” section of The Martyrology, Book II as his brother Don had given to his fantasy life when bringing him to Toronto in 1964. Barrie had then seen his “task” to be to dump that “dreamworld,” but it wasn’t until 1971 that he could dump, or declare dead, the dream world of saints that his childhood comic book fantasies had evolved into.
Chapter 17: Russian Roulette
1. Doyle challenges Goodbrand’s characterization of Lea both as urging the building of a community and as having a “European” understanding of psychoanalysis. On October 10, 2010, Doyle writes that first of all there was no effective community: “he [Goodbrand] says that ‘In 1974 the community committed itself to finding sufficient land to feed a community of a thousand. A fourth one hundred acre farm was purchased . . .’ Pg 135. ‘The community’ — if he is speaking here of the several hundred who were then members — had not only no forum to discuss such a project, but no knowledge of the purchase until after the fact. Even then it became known only gradually as people heard of it while up at the farm. Decisions of this nature were made by a small group, by Lea with Rob, Barry [sic], and Visvaldis. Rik would be involved as he handled financial details. [. . . .] These decisions and their implementation happened only at the top.” Lea herself, Doyle argues, often held the Hypno I therapists, who had bought the first farm, responsible for the “community” concept. “Her own ambivalence [was] stated periodically in seminar groups, about the developing community. ‘It was you people who wanted this, not me,’ she would direct at the former religious” (“Thoughts,” October 10, 2010). As for community and social justice being specific to European schools of psychoanalysis, Doyle writes, “The Europeans of whom Lea spoke most often were Freud, Klein, and Reich. Each had his or her own followers and detracters. [. . . .] The gossip and in-fighting within that rarified air was as intense as in any professional arena. To my knowledge (though I would be happy to be contradicted) none established or advocated a community based on psychoanalytic principles or as an outgrowth and extension of therapeutic resolution” (“Thoughts,” November 16, 2010).
2. Goodbrand quotes Therafields member and therapist Father Jim Conlon as telling him that “[p]eople had real trust in bp. He was the balance wheel. He settled things whenever he was around. He let people find their own lives. He had no agenda for anyone. He had no expectation of how their lives would unfold. Lea could be interfering, sometimes to great benefit,” Goodbrand adds, “Everyone on occasion, distrusted Lea, Rob or Visvaldis, but not Barrie” (106).
3. The A Publication editorial had given the general members of Therafields the illusion of democracy, or at least of being consulted. But the actual decisions were made by management, as Doyle indicates in note 1 above. Goodbrand argues that even the senior therapists of Hypno I felt ignored during such decision-making. One of the ex-Therafields responders to Doyle’s blog wrote to her, “This is the stuff of cults,” and quoted Howard Adelman, a philosopher and co-founder of Rochdale College, as having told him, “It’s like a giant wedding cake with Lea and Visvaldis on top, then her children, Josie, Rob, Malcolm and Barrie, too. The next tier was Hypno I, then CAG [the Character Analysis Group], then the Brunswick Group, then everyone else in the house groups. Finally, everyone else receiving therapy. The communication and feedback went from the top downward” (Comment posted July 22, 2011).
4. The lines also recall his thoughts about the psychic suicide his fantasy life had constituted, and in their gun imagery echo from 1971 his lines toward the end of The Martyrology II:
the one thing always i have feared
my own rashness
killing myself on whim
i carry shotgun shells in my pocket
blow my brains out in a department store
shocked faces my own surprise
folding slowly on the floor
silent as i had never been in life
Chapter 18: Strange Years
1. In Multineddu’s interview with Barrie, Multineddu asks why so much of the middle books of The Martyrology seem to have been written while he is travelling. “You travel a lot,” Multineddu exclaims. Barrie replies, “Well, I tend to write a lot when I travel, that’s all [laughing]. . . . It’s actually the other way around, that very often the time I had free to write was when I was travelling. [. . . .] I would sit with my notebook and I would write for like five, six, eight, ten hours, just pausing to sleep, or eat a bit . . .” (27).
2. Lea’s books were all novels, which she seems to have based on idealizing reconstructions of her own life. She intended them as instructive examples of the kinds of psychoanalytic problems and solutions that an individual could encounter, and viewed them as more useful than academic description of cases and methodologies. In a sense she was using her life as an extended Freudian case study. This approach echoed the one she took in her seminars, which was to teach through anecdote and through doing analysis with some of those present rather than on the basis of a curriculum with assigned topics and readings. The language in these novels was often simple and repetitive, a style she may have been encouraged to continue by Barrie because of its distant reminders of the style of Gertrude Stein. It is possibly no accident that all three writers — Lea, Barrie, and Stein, author of Everybody’s Autobiography and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — were deeply engaged by the challenges of autobiography. It is also likely, considering Barrie’s co-authorship of Lea’s two short essays, that he advised her editorially on these novels. Goodbrand believes that he did, and that he also wrote a chapter of her first book (email, November 3, 2011), though neither of us have encountered documents that confirm this. However, in general there is almost no documentation of Barrie’s relationships with people he saw routinely in his Toronto and Mono Township activities; their communication was usually oral.
3. Lea’s novels were almost as elaborately inter-related as Barrie’s Martyrology was with his other published and unpublished books. “The Summonsa Tapestries” at this point were projected to contain two trilogies, one titled “Ronald” and containing the novels Ronald and Susan (1975), The Way It Might Have Been (1977), and the uncompleted “Suron,” and the second titled “La Covenir” and containing Secret Places (1976), Not for You Tea in the Afternoon (19), and “Threshold,” also uncompleted. Barrie’s review “for the Easily Defensive” reflected resentment in the general Therafields community about being expected to purchase and read books that many considered to be at best awkwardly written. (They probably would not have enjoyed a Stein novel either!) It also echoed Lea’s now routine rebuffing of any criticism by suggesting that the dissenter was suffering from unconscious limitations — such as paranoia, mother-hatred, or mistrust of “the matrix.” Doyle suggests that this change in Lea reflected her own need for more therapy, writing “The identified ‘paranoid’ others became for her a present day embodiment of the until then successfully repressed terrors that she had held since a young child. It is likely that these terrors centred around her father as it was primarily men that Lea began to identify as paranoid. She declared herself no longer willing to work with them. The men who had worked with her as clients, as learners, and as colleagues on the development of the farm became divided into two groups: those who were with her, that is, who didn’t challenge her centrality and those who held opinions contrary to her own.” Barrie, it would seem, was at this point still one of the former. See also Goodbrand 212.
4. The book that resulted in part from Marlatt’s visit to Avebury is her How Hug a Stone. For a survey of critical responses to Marlatt’s “mother goddess” suggestions see my article “Words and Stones in How Hug a Stone,” in my book Canadian Literary Power, 167-96.
5. One can speculate that Barrie’s understanding of his relationship to his parents, including that he had transferred his devotion to his mother from her to his writing — to “Mother Tongue” — and was still waiting for a meaningful communication from his father, has left him inhabiting any possible female deity as he writes and thus without need to acknowledge her further, while also repeatedly addressing a usually silent “Lord” or “father.”
6. Again, it should be noted that Ellie Nichol says that she was unaware that Barrie may have been experiencing discomfort over the prospect of sharing a domestic space with her, and is puzzled by the humorous and self-deprecating remarks he made about the matter in his correspondence — here to his cousin Donna, and to his sister Deanna in the next paragraph — believing that he probably made them more to make himself appear “normal” to his family and non-Therafields friends than to express his actual feelings.
7. Ellie may also have been unaware of Barrie’s irritation about what he perceived as his mother’s deliberate shunning of her — or possibly saw it as unreasonable. She remembers his mother fondly as independent, cheerful, and hospitable, and given their similar Saskatchewan backgrounds, may have identified with her. She has suggested that it would be unfair for her to be unfavourably remembered no matter what comments Barrie may have made about her.
Chapter 19: Blown Away
1. At least three of the songs referred to specific psychoanalytic issues Barrie himself had grappled with. “Ordinary Man” recalled his “ho-ho-ho” habit of not taking himself seriously (something he lamented in his very first notebook), of pretending that he didn’t have important thoughts, anxieties, or — in the Four Horsemen’s case — contributions that he wished to make. “Australopithecus,” with its lines “And when I find a man / It makes me so mad / Because he always starts / to remind me of dad” echoed Barrie’s Oedipal attachment to his mother, as — more obviously — did the song “I am Obsessed with My Mother’s Breasts.” Therafields insiders who knew something of Barrie’s past had an additional reason to laugh.
2. In a letter to Daphne Marlatt, who was co-editing with John Marshall the Island Writing Series, Barrie described his concern about whether publication of this “hour” might distress Ellie. He had thus checked with her about it, and got her approval. She’d said that she could never see why Zelda had gotten angry unless Fitzgerald had lied. Barrie went on to write that Ellie’d also told him she was comfortable with anything he wrote about her appearing, as long as he wasn’t lying, and that this had been the only occasion on which he’d “bothered” to ask anyone in advance about something he’d written about them. But in this instance, he wrote, it seemed important to do so because the events were still raw to both of them.
Chapter 20: Eric Von Daniken Meets Kurt Schwitters
1. McCaffery however mistakenly assigns the decision to dissolve Therafields and end Barrie’s role in it to 1987 rather than 1982.
2. Barrie evidently never did, in his own mind at least, entirely rid himself of the “ho, ho, hoing” “cheerful lad” defence mechanism that made it easy during his childhood and adolescence for his parents and friends to regard him as easygoing and untroubled. In the case of the Four Horsemen it is very possible that the other three could have little idea of the distress that their wit and stubbornness around written collaboration could cause him. Dutton recalls Barrie’s preference for harmony and aversion to conflict as good things — “It was he who most effectively resolved conflicts, who most often solved tactical problems, who gave direction and inspired loyalty. And he did it all with a light hand . . .” (email January 11, 2012). Even someone as close to Barrie as Ellie could have been misled into perceiving him as much less prone to anxiety than he has recorded himself as being. Defence mechanisms, of course, are ways of fictionalizing ourselves.
Chapter 21: Unable to Rest
1. “Tracks” was based on the story of the building in the 19th century of a railroad from Cobourg through the Rice Lake area to Peterborough. Barrie’s interest in story was thus partly derived from his father’s CNR employment and the numerous resulting family journeys by rail.
2. His lawyer was my partner, Linda, who had previously been his agent under her maiden name, Linda McCartney. She was also our colleague on the Coach House editorial board.
3. First Screening is presently viewable on the internet at http://vispo.com/bp/ in various reconstructed versions. See also Geoff Huth’s article “First Meaning: The Digital Poetry Incunabula of bpNichol,” and “Introduction to bpNichol’s First Screening” by Jim Andrews, Geoff Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi, and Dan Waber, both published in Open Letter 13:5, Spring 2008.
4. Len McGravey, an ex-Basilian who joined Lea Hindley-Smith’s Catholic Group in 1968 and who in 1973 became a member of the Therafields “Gemini 2” learning group (along with Mary Barton, Howard Gerhard, Rafael Baretto-Rivera, John Ligoure, and Paul Dutton, among almost 40 others), and continued in the Therafields community until 1980, recalled in his 2007 blog that a close Therafields friend in the early 1970s had died from excessive fasting. He wrote that in this period “Lea Hindley-Smith and some of her therapists often experimented with various fasting fads, following the dietary systems of current gurus. [. . . .] She believed that natural healing was the blessed way to wholeness, recommending to her followers organic remedies, including various extreme combinations of diets and fasting for long periods of time. She also insisted that this process must be strictly supervised by alert qualified personnel. For that, I’ll give her credit as is her due. Kurt first experimented with the short fast of a few days. Shortly afterwards, he adopted Lea’s belief in the ‘long fast,’ sipping only water of [sic] juice over the prospected period. He and others believed that the long fast would ‘clear up the accumulated toxins in the body.’ This ‘purification process’ was also intended for healing the body organs and bringing balance to any emotional turbulence” (“A Brief History of Therafields, Part Six”).
5. Dutton recalls that one of Barrie’s York students had been amazed by “his stocking up on junk food during class breaks — potato chips and candy, Diet Coke and tea, and apparently all of those in the same break,” and suggests that Barrie’s “oral needs were enormous.” He adds that he “was often startled by some of his food choices (wieners and chicken-skin and the aforementioned junk food), given all the healthy-food info he was exposed to, both within and outside of Therafields.” Barrie himself writes in “The Mouth,” in Selected Organs, “When I went into therapy my therapist always said I had an oral personality” and mentions his fixations on oral sex, oral gratification, and the “oral reality of the poem” (15) — all of these very likely related to his Oedipal preoccupations that mark the opening poems of Selected Organs, “The Vagina,” “The Mouth,” and “The Tonsils.”
6. The dedication is somewhat mysterious. Bernstein was not at the festival and does not appear to be even implicitly alluded to within the text. There is very little correspondence between Barrie and him. He recalls that although he had met Barrie at one or two conferences that he never once, to his regret, heard Barrie read.
7. Dutton considers The Gargoyle “one of the most memorable of Nichol’s lyricist-composer collaborations” and worthy of production to larger audiences. Barrie, however, considered it a peripheral work, written, like his television scripts, mainly for money. While he was enjoying the collaboration that both theatre and television require, much as he had enjoyed and supported collaboration and cooperation at both Therafields and in the Four Horsemen, he would rather have been spending his time expanding The Martyrology, extending his various ’pataphysical collections or trying to finish the ever-present “bpNichol by John Cannyside.”
Chapter 22: The Waste of My Words
1. Barrie appears to have made this decision to change the title while Coach House Press was designing the book. The change allowed the cover to be a kind of visual poem in that the “6” did double-duty by signifying both that this was Book 6 and that Book 6 contained “6 books.”
2. The only published remnant of “The Bard Project” so far is “‘IM: mortality play,” which appeared in 1990 in Line 25:2, 7-10.
3. On Barrie’s death Juhl may have been one of the most generous responders, sending the family a reported $10,000, most likely in recognition of the precarious income and benefit situation of a freelance writer.
4. This is the only act of overt self-censorship that I have found Barrie to have committed, one that is in a sense negated by the earlier magazine publication.
5. The inclusion of Dewdney, Fawcett, and Bromige, however, did support Barrie’s allegation that the writers in the collection were too diffuse in their aims and assumptions to form a group. Barrie’s own writing was light-years closer to the Language goal of valuing words “for what they are themselves” rather than as “instrumentalities leading us to a world outside or beyond them” (Andrews and Bernstein, x) than that of either Dewdney or Fawcett.
6. There may have been more at play in Barrie’s outburst against the “Language group” than McCaffery was aware of. Andrews had written to Barrie several times in the spring and summer of 1977 urging him to contribute to the magazine he and Charles Bernstein were about to launch. But it is unclear whether Barrie answered the first two of these letters. Andrews seemed interested more in Barrie writing a short article about McCaffery than in his sending L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E some of his own poetry. Barrie could have sent poetry from among his current manuscripts, but an article would have required new reading and writing. It’s also possible that Barrie could have been offended by the specificity of Andrews’s request and its implications for how he might comparatively view his and McCaffery’s writing. In 1998 McCaffery commented that Barrie’s “response to Language Writing” had been “surprisingly little,” and speculated that he may have disagreed with its “connected critique of the sign, reference and narrative” while also having “cultivated (briefly) some stylistic affinities with Language Writing” (Jaeger, 86–87).
7. When Mann was doing the final editing of the film in the spring of 1988 Barrie would also make frequent visits to his studio to view and advise. Mann remembers that he would not sit but would stand with the aid of a wooden cane.
8. Dutton describes “MEME” as calling “for two male and two female poets (sound poets, actually), two solo singers, three dancers, a choir, a marching band and an electronic ensemble. The language the poets speak is one of Nichol’s own invention, comprising a limited vocabulary of eleven root words, with various prefixes and suffixes of a mainly prepositional nature. The words, which signify a few objects and elements in nature, some personal pronouns, and a few basic emotional states, serve the purposes of the simple drama that gradually unfolds. The choir, which functions as a Greek chorus, mixes English with the language Nichol invented” (1989).
Chapter 23: Unbound
1. Reluctant to publish the poems in a now obsolete technology — the Apple IIe had now been replaced by the Apple Macintosh, which used a different operating system — Red Deer waited until 1993 to publish a Macintosh Hypercard version of First Screening that had been created by University of Calgary student J.B. Holm. That type of Macintosh in turn became obsolete in 2004.
2. The surgeon also regretted that the tumour had not been detected much earlier, which in his opinion it should have been. Later a check of an x-ray taken before Barrie’s 1985 surgery, one apparently centered on the L5-S1 spinal area, revealed that the tumour was visible at the bottom.
Chapter 24: The Afterlife of bpNichol
1. It is noteworthy that Ellie did not write about the requested topic, “The Influence of Therafields on bp’s Writing” (113), although she did write about Therafields and some of Barrie’s experiences there. As mentioned earlier, she does not perceive much connection between his therapy, or his work as a psychoanalyst, and his writing, and is skeptical about the soundness of the connections that I make here — while also clearly realizing that without Lea’s help it’s unlikely that he would have become the writer that we know. As Barrie wrote at the beginning of The Martyrology, Book 5, “still / for Lea / still.” It is also noteworthy that in Barrie’s musical comedy Group, from which Ellie gets her substitute title, “The Ordinary Man,” the phrase “ordinary man” is heavily (and amusingly) ironized — see An H in the Heart 68–9.
2. This is Steve McCaffery’s recollection, in his interview by Peter Jaeger. Considering the question of whether Barrie would have “approved” being published by McClelland & Stewart, McCaffery tells Jaeger, “Absolutely not. Leaving aside Nichol’s own convictions never to be published by a mainstream press such as M&S, and his commitment to small press publication till the day he died (we spoke about this on our last day together as he drove me from his home on Lauder Avenue to the St. Clair subway station)” (Jaeger 84). McCaffery also regrets here that he was not consulted about the collection by Ellie Nichol or the editors, and says that he considers it an “insult” that work he had co-authored with Nichol was included by them without acknowledgement, adding, “I was told by Barrie in the late 1970s that I was designated in his will as his literary executor” — a will that in 1983 was replaced because of Barrie and Ellie’s marriage. After Barrie’s death, he continues, he was told by someone that “Barrie’s revised will specified me as executor in the event of both their [Ellie and Sarah Nichol’s] deaths” (84–85). However, Barrie’s 1979 will had not named him as literary executor, but only as a member of an advisory committee of him, Julia Keeler, and Rob Hindley-Smith to be consulted by the will’s executor, Renwick Day. His final will, signed in November 1983, and probated in December 1988, names Ellie as executor, Renwick Day as alternate executor, gives his executor sole power to deal with his published and unpublished works and his copyrights, and makes no mention of McCaffery. Quite possibly the frosty relations between McCaffery and Ellie, so evident in the Jaeger interview, were already cool at the time of the will.