Read an Excerpt
Aka bpNichol
A Preliminary Biography
By Frank Davey ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Frank Davey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-260-2
CHAPTER 1
Birth, Death, and Life, 1944–48
The 'i' is me and isn't me.
— Nichol in Niechoda, A Sourcery, 178
At Vancouver's mock-Tudor Grace Hospital in late September 1944, the birth of Glen and Avis Nichol's fifth child, soon to be named Barrie Phillip, was apparently uneventful. The hospital photographer took the routine photo and inserted it into a small folder that bore a sepia engraving of the hospital. In a few days the newborn's mother would paste both folder and photo into a "baby book" and record his weight (9 pounds, 14 ounces) and length (22 inches). Under "Remarks" she would whimsically write that she didn't need to remark, that of course she and the rest of the family thought he was wonderful. On the next page she recorded the gifts he had received and commented that he'd done really well, especially considering that he was the family's fifth child. This was bpNichol's first book, and like quite a few others it would be unfinished. Avis's final health entry — on the fourth page — reported that he'd received his first vegetables at four months; several earlier lines, including the one for when he received his first "solid food," she left unfilled. Although the book allowed a parent five years of narrative, almost all of the remaining pages were also left blank, and with them their spaces for when baby first crawled, walked, or talked.
Such barely begun baby books are not unusual. New parents — especially ones with other children — have numerous demands on their time. In the Nichols' case three other children vied for their attention — their eldest, Donna, born in Saskatoon in September 1933, had died at six weeks, much to Avis's continuing distress. Then had come Bob in 1935, Don in 1937, and Deanna in 1940. Their day-to-day well-being was mostly their mother's responsibility. Deanna recalls that their father, like many Canadian men of his time, understood his main family duty as the bringing home of a paycheque. He worked in the freight department of the Canadian National Railway, and was regularly promoted and transferred, under company policy, to a different city approximately every four or so years. To refuse a transfer was to refuse the promotion. The family had started out in Saskatoon, where Donna, Bob, and Don had been born, moved to Regina in 1937, to Port Arthur (now part of Thunder Bay) in 1939, and to the working-class Vancouver suburb of Burnaby in 1941. Avis thus did not have a large number of local friends, although her mother, now a widow, did live with them in Burnaby for part of the war years. Two cousins, with whom she enjoyed outings, also lived nearby.
Years later Barrie would hint in his novel Journal that he believed that he may not have been a "wanted" child. While this usage of "want" implies an exaggeration, it does seem unlikely that he was planned. With Deanna's birth in 1940 the Nichols had a "complete" boys-and-girl family — one that Donna's unfortunate death had made more difficult to achieve. Donna, moreover, had remained a haunting family presence through her mother's frequent recollections, which she continued to routinely verbalize even after the birth of Deanna's children in the 1960s. Donna was so present in the family during Barrie's childhood that into early adulthood he would have the illusion that somewhere she was alive, and possibly dictating much of his writing to him from "beyond." In one of his early notebooks he wrote of her as a fellow artist and implicit twin. Quite possibly he saw Donna as more present to his mother than he was himself. Barrie also seems to have come to associate his mother with death. In a 1968 notebook he would write a passage for his unpublished book "The Plunkett Papers" — in it either misremembering or reconstructing Donna's death as happening in 1934, and at six months rather than six weeks. He would add that he had once found her tiny shoes in a box, and that they'd been smaller than the palm of his hand, and added also the apparent non sequitur that his mother once had a pet rabbit that slept in her bed and that smothered one night when she unknowingly rolled over on it. Presumably this event occurred while his mother was a child. Death had been following him, was obsessing him, he would write. In the spring of 1977, possibly during a visit with both his parents and his sister Deanna in Victoria, he would develop a theory of how his mother's persistent grief at Donna's death had dominated her view of her later children ("The Way Notebook," January 31, 1977). In 1982 he would include this detail in The Martyrology, Book 5, Chain 3, writing how his mother continued
crying after Donna's death
nothing left to remember her by
echoed her in Deanna's name
the next & last girl to be born
& Don
when he came into this world
Curiously, Barrie almost followed Donna into his own early death. Sometime after he was three months old, around the family dinnertime, he stopped breathing and turned blue. Avis shouted to Glen to call a doctor. Glen replied that it was too late, that Barrie was already dead. Recounted frequently by Avis, the words became part of the family history. Somehow he was revived — Deanna later came to believe that he may have had a convulsion. Barrie wrote about the incident several times in his journals and partly fictionalized "autobiographies," sometimes recalling it as happening when he was three months old, sometimes when six months, sometimes when eight months. In his "Notebook Begun March 13, 1971" he drafted a possible Martyrology, Book 3 section to be called "Future Music," and wrote that when he was "maybe" eight months of age his father believed he was dead and thought it futile to call a doctor. In his "Notebook #3" on April 18, 1972, he created his first draft of "The Autobiography of Phillip Workman by bpNichol," and had Phillip recall that his mother told him that he almost died when he was "maybe" three months old, that his body turned blue, that he appeared to be choking, that he couldn't breathe, and that even while his mother was phoning the doctor his father was shouting that there was no point in phoning, that he was already dead. In his "Notebook Begun February 21, 1974" he recorded a dream on March 18, 1975, and wrote that it seemed to be about material that he tried to avoid thinking about, the time when he was around six months of age and turned blue, no longer interested in living. The inability of his parents to explain the incident seems to have mythologized it for Barrie, and led him to suspect that his early childhood had been so unhappy that he had tried to die by forcing himself to stop breathing — a child at three, six, or eight months already suicidal. These notebook passages would lead in 1977 to a more poetic narration, which he included in Chain 3 of The Martyrology, Book 5 in 1982, and which appears to declare attempted suicide a certainty. The apparently unexplainable "reason" for the incident was, he wrote, "inside me":
my sister Donna died
six weeks old
as i almost died
six months old
Rupert Street in Vancouver
choking to death for no reason
the no reason was inside me
Here he got her age correct, and possibly his own, but got, or made, the place of his near-death wrong. At the time (whether he was three months, six months, or eight months old) the family was still living in a large rented house at 2661 Blenheim Avenue (now renamed Burlington Avenue) in Burnaby. His father did not buy their house at 4936 Rupert Street a few blocks away in Vancouver until January 1947. A few pages later Barrie linked himself and Donna as having shared "a fear of living" and suggested that his not dying may have been a turning back from suicide:
we shared that fear of living
you died at six weeks
i almost died at six months
in that moment glimpsing you
we shared some common experience
i turned away
back into the world
For Barrie this almost-dying incident appears to have become in his early years a self-defining moment. He was someone who had been allowed to choose between living and dying. Both the option of death and death's inevitability would always be in his consciousness. But so too would be the conviction that when one chooses life one is choosing the fullest possible engagement with it — with family, history, language, art, music, and above all imagination. Only such a wide, intense, and fruitful life could satisfy him — or enable him to avoid depression.
In these various notebooks he recorded only two vivid early childhood memories. In the first, which he recorded in his April 18, 1972, draft of "The Autobiography of Phillip Workman by bpNichol," he was crawling on the grass in their Burnaby garden, not yet able to walk or talk. It was a warm spring or summer day. He had a slight panic that he may have crawled too far from his mother, and looked back through a trellis to reassure himself that she was there. She was, her face turned toward him, and framed by profusely flowering vines, morning glory or possibly sweet pea, but her eyes seemingly vacant and focussed on things miles beyond him. Her hair was long and blonde, he wrote, as it was in photographs from that time, but in her eyes he recalled sensing things he was once unable to describe — vague sadness, unfocussed anger. Her gaze disturbed him and would come to haunt him. He wrote that those memories were reminding him as well of a dream he had later of crawling down an extremely long hallway and finding his mother in an old kitchen weeping at the table. He added that he thought the dream was not memory but a vision of what he had wordlessly understood that day in the garden.
Substantially rewritten, this garden scene would reappear in the closing pages of his novel Journal.
i'm speaking mommy & you arent listening so many times i would stand at the foot of the garden calling your name quietly so that you wouldn't hear me i wanted you to hear me for so many years i wanted you to hear so badly & i couldnt speak i'd call your name to myself tired now finally frightened but never stopping always calling quietly at the foot of the garden as the sun went down over the trellis (74)
Here the child is able to talk, but reluctant to do so in case his talking might confirm the terrifying possibility that his mother is indeed unable or unwilling to hear.
Was Barrie's mother as sad, distant, and vaguely angry as "bpNichol" describes these mothers as being? It's impossible to know, and quite possible that she wasn't. But this seems to have been his childhood perception of her — one that lodged in his unconscious and caused him many years of unhappiness. Twenty-five years later he would tell his sister Deanna, who had questioned the accuracy of his memories, that he must have been an "unusually sensitive child."
In the second early childhood memory he was sharing a bathtub with his mother. Barrie treated this memory as a gothic nightmare in 1969 in "For Jesus Lunatick" (Two Novels 32–33), and as an opportunity for humour in "The Vagina" (Selected Organs: Parts of An Autobiography), first drafted in April 18, 1980. In the latter he attributed his childhood desire to have a vagina to these shared baths, which sometimes appear to have included his slightly older sister as well. In his correspondence files is the carbon of a 1979 letter he has jokingly addressed to Deanna as his former bathtub mate (January 30, 1979). But in 1972, in the first draft of "The Autobiography of Phillip Workman by bpNichol," his bath narrative was both darker and explicit. He wrote of how, when with him in the bathtub, "Phillip's" mother changes from seeming vague and remote to being overpoweringly present and how that drastic contrast splits his feelings and his understanding of her reality. She seems to be two irreconcilable women, he wrote. Seated between her legs in the warm steam of the bath, he makes himself into second persona in an attempt to cope with her enveloping vastness. But this tactic merely fractures his fragile sense of self, making him afterward a different person, a "puppet," with each woman he meets. He cannot reconcile his various consequent selves any more than he could envision the two "or three" versions of his mother as a whole person. Moreover, he wrote, he never knows which woman, which version of his mother, he is about to meet, and thus which version of himself he must summon. Large parts of the adult Barrie Nichol were foreshadowed in this long passage — his understanding of, and fascination with, variability and alternativity, his awareness that he can have multiple self-constructed identities and parlay these into alternate semi-fictional versions of himself, his ability to imagine hypothetical "'pataphysical" realities.
One reason that the 1972 Barrie Nichol semi-concealed this painful memory under the semi-pseudonym "Phillip Workman" is that he knew, as a psychoanalytical therapist, that this was his memory, his memory as "a sensitive child," and not necessarily what someone else who viewed or experienced these events would have thought was happening. (In a notebook entry dated March 17, 1965, he recorded having already read psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler's Parents Not Guilty of Their Children's Neuroses.) Another reason is that he wanted his parents, should they happen to read this text, to assume it was a fiction. As he reworked this "Autobiography" he would further fictionalize it and radicalize its prose — perhaps consciously, or unconsciously, hoping that this could discourage someone like his mother from reading it. In 1987, when preparing his prose-poem sequence "Organ Music" for publication, he would omit the poem "The Lily," with its "long" section about his father's post-coital penis, out of concern that his father might read it; he had to rename the truncated manuscript "Selected Organs."
This evidently embarrassing mention of his father is a rare explicitly autobiographical reference to him, although there are numerous disturbingly metaphoric descriptions of a sexual "father" named "Frank" in Journal (33–43) in which a narrator named "Phillip" desperately laments his unrequited Oedipal desire for his mother — descriptions clearly written by a Nichol who was, as Stephen Scobie would write in 1982, "deeply aware of Freud" (86).
One reason for his father's absence in Barrie's recollections may well be that the two had little early interaction — frighteningly little, perhaps, from the son's perspective. Deanna's memory of their father is as a man who "was not into little kids too much," and who "liked us a lot better when we became adults." Her mother, she says, "was always making excuses for him — I look at it that way now — she was always explaining why Dad might be in a bad mood." According to Deanna, she often described how hard it was for him to concentrate while working in an open room where there were "all these stenos going type-type-type-type-type all day long while he had to be thinking about whatever it was he was doing. 'So therefore when your dad gets home he wants peace and quiet.'" Deanna further recalls, "I didn't know that other people talked at the dinner table because quiet was the way it was supposed to be." She recounts that when they lived on Rupert Street her mother "once in a while would rebel and say she was going downtown" with her cousins and the children would exclaim "don't go, because dad will have to cook for us." The only thing he could cook was porridge, which he always over-salted. She also recalls that once
Mom said to Dad, "It's time you did something with the children, so take them to Stanley Park, and buy them some 7-Up and ice cream" — you know, she's telling him how to do it. I still remember how — of course it all had to be done in a hurry, with Dad, and so you had to hurry up and eat the ice cream, hurry up and drink the 7-Up. And then we went into the aquarium, and I still remember seeing this octopus and then vomiting on the floor — poor Dad. And then Dad of course was so embarrassed. I don't know who cleaned it up. But it was not a good experience, for Dad or for us, particularly. Yeah, Dad was not into little kids too much.
But she does not recall such incidents as being unusual for the time or traumatic for the children. Rather they are amusing and endearing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Aka bpNichol by Frank Davey. Copyright © 2012 Frank Davey. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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