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INTRODUCTION:

Siting La Place

BY CHRISTOPHER ELSON

It’s all a question of seeing — of eyesight on site.

— Place d’Armes (125)¹

I left several lives behind ...

— Interview with Tim Wilson²

Scott Symons, one of Canada’s most remarkable and controversial cultural figures, passed away on February 23, 2009. He was seventy-five years old. “My life is a sketch toward a life I’ll never have time to live” is a phrase he often used with his friends and in interviews. Symons’s life was indeed a remarkable one — abundant, excessive, troubling, exigent, and colourful in the extreme. The fruitful and destructive tensions between his lived experience and his artistic project lie at the very heart of his literary reflection. Combat Journal for Place d’Armes, first published in 1967, was the inaugural statement of this unique sensibility, a work worthy of republication and reappraisal.

Reaction to Symons’s passing in the media was predictably ambivalent. Although he had fallen nearly silent in recent years, the echo of decades of greater and lesser social controversy and the received critical judgment of an overweening and unrealized artistic ambition with which the name of Symons had come to be associated were the dominant notes of the necrologies and articles published in the wake of his death.

Martin Levin of the Globe and Mail referred in his blog to Symons as a “potent and scathing presence” in the Canadian literary life of the 1960s and 1970s and noted that “I never met Symons. And somewhat regret it (I think).” Film director Nik Sheehan’s appreciation of Scott in the March 12, 2009, edition of Xtra! characterized the late author as “an uncompromising artist, a difficult friend and a giant of a man.” David Warren’s column in the February 25 Ottawa Citizen engaged the same terrain, differently: “Scott was, in the best Byronic tradition, ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know.’ I was honoured as well as inconvenienced to know him well. I loved him, and wish him success in his new vocation.” Warren contributed in some further measure to the appraisal of his artistic accomplishment: “With sex out of the way, Scott’s topic was Canada: the dignity she had, and had lost. Paradoxically, he was a true son of that Rosedale heritage, very proud of its accomplishments, and painfully ashamed of its decline into trend-conscious mediocrity.” Sandra Martin’s obituary in the Globe and Mail gave a very thorough account of the complex life lived while emphasizing the view (widely held) that Scott Symons had not established the necessary distance between autobiographical exploration and literary characterization and narration: “His life was his art. Alas, it was not a masterpiece.”

Who was this writer, this man capable of eliciting such admiration, uneasiness, excitement, fascination, and condescension? And what does his work mean for us today?

Hugh Brennan Scott Symons was born on July 13, 1933, in Toronto (between Orange Day and Bastille Day, as he once delightedly said to me). He was one of seven siblings, the son of well-established members of Toronto society. His father, Major Harry Symons, had been a star quarterback, a fighter pilot in the First World War, and was a writer himself, winner of the inaugural Stephen Leacock Prize for Humour in 1947. His grandfather, William Limberry Symons, was one of the architects of Union Station in Toronto and a major contributor to the dwellings and character of Symons’s beloved Rosedale neighbourhood. On his mother’s side, the Bull family legacy and its English connections were deeply influential for Symons. His grandfather, Percy Bull, was a near-legendary figure in Toronto, known by many as the Duke of Rosedale, a cantankerous “rogue male” and a member of the Mark Twain Society.³

Symons attended Trinity College School (TCS) in Port Hope, Ontario, where he met his lifelong friend, Charles Taylor (son of E.P., a Globe and Mail London and Beijing correspondent, and author of Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern and Radical Tories). In a 1997 Vision TV interview with Tim Wilson, Symons remarked on the quasi-Benedictine character of life at TCS, and trembling with emotion evoked the impact of having attended Anglican chapel twice a day for five years. The sense of life as ongoing liturgy, the conviction of its sacramental character that permeates Place d’Armes and other works, had its roots in that environment. He also recalled with scorn the anti-intellectualism of the establishment boys there. For Symons, “jock” would always be synonymous with cultural underachievement — personal and national.

After a year in the city at University of Toronto Schools following a gymnastics accident, Symons attended Trinity College, University of Toronto, and took a B.A. in modern history, studying with eminent Canadian historians of varied ideological stripe such as Frank Underhill, Donald Creighton, and Maurice Careless. Like many other university students of his generation, Symons was a summer officer cadet with the University Naval Training Division. He self-deprecatingly referred to himself as “the least pusser cadet they’d ever seen.” But he took real pride in this affiliation and had great affection for the Royal Canadian Navy, which he always cast in later years as a Dickensian universe of improbable and touching characters.

Scott took a “gentleman’s M.A.” in English literature at Cambridge University from 1955 to 1957 where he studied with F.R. Leavis and was influenced by tutors such as Dorothea Krook and Basil Willey. While admiring his tutors greatly, he claimed his real education in England was in the King’s College Chapel, at Evensong, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, and with relatives in London. In March 1958 he married Judith Morrow, granddaughter of the president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce. For the next three years he and his wife were to move between journalism jobs in Quebec and study at the Sorbonne, where Symons received a Diplôme d’Etudes supérieures and where he became close to the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel and a regular at Marcel’s salon. Symons once recounted for me the humorous but bittersweet anecdote of how he fell out with Gabriel Marcel. He and his wife put on a skit about a small accident they’d had and a police officer who had caused them problems, a sketch they thought amusingly showed French stubbornness and unwillingness to admit ignorance in the face of obvious contradiction. The renowned philosopher, dramatist, and music critic found it too clichéd and insulting, and they weren’t invited to return.

The Paris interlude was intended to bolster a deepening relation to the French language and to French Canada. Symons and his wife became collectors of French Canadiana, particularly of rooster weather vanes. He claimed to have been shot at by an angry farmer as he tried to steal one, with his wife saving the day in the getaway car. There is no doubt that they became close to the burgeoning intellectual and cultural scene. In a 1963 speech in Winnipeg, Symons stated without hyperbole or irony, “we witness in French Canada what is perhaps the most talented, the most purposeful outburst of creative energy anywhere in the Western world today. (It makes the New Frontier group of the United States look like a posthumous Edwardian garden party.)”

By then Symons’s intimate knowledge and insightful perceptions of Quebec had been recognized with the 1961 National Newspaper Award for a series written in French in La Presse and published in his own translation by the Ottawa Journal. The series described the emerging Quiet Revolution. Symons even sometimes claimed to have coined the term. He had become an honorary member of the St-Jean Baptiste Society, the first Protestant ever so honoured, and was close to the influential editor of Le Devoir, André Laurendeau, later of the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission. Yet Symons had to move on from journalism. Responding to a mixture of family and inner pressures, he sought and accepted a position as curatorial assistant in the Canadiana Department at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM).

From 1961 to 1965, Symons worked at the ROM, becoming chief curator of the Canadian collections, and was an assistant professor of art history at the University of Toronto. He and his wife had a son, Graham. Symons was awarded a visiting curatorship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and was also made a research associate at the Winterthur Museum, the principal American museum of the decorative arts. Charles Taylor’s Six Journeys contains an account of a public talk Symons gave at the Smithsonian about French-Canadian and New England rooster weather vanes, and the comparative properties of those “cocks.” “His audience, who listened in absolute silence, became aware that he was giving a lecture on comparative eroticism,” writes Taylor. Symons’s unique take on the life and liveliness of objects and his exhaustive connoisseurship didn’t go unnoticed in the United States, and he was offered a position at the Smithsonian. He declined, citing a “date with the Canadian Centennial.”

Indeed, somewhere between his sense of the disparity between the dominant accounts of Canadian history and what the objects were telling him (“furniture doesn’t lie”) and his shock at the adoption of a new Canadian flag designed by a committee and first flown in February 1965, Symons came to the difficult decision to leave behind his life of privilege and cultural achievement. There was also the matter of his increasing interest in the erotic beauty and sexual attractiveness of men. Somehow this erotic turn was connected to his concern with the loss of national character, purpose, and potency. This sense of personal and collective crisis had to be dealt with; the urgency became simply irresistible for Symons. In 1989 he recalled the decision to quit and head for Montreal, a move that he always called a démission, no doubt because the French word retains a sense of mission rather than simply conveying the fatality and fatigue of resignation:

I contemplated for at least five years before I did what I did that it would have to be done. I kept waiting for other people to do it. Why should I, who was happily married, had a lovely home in Toronto, a lovely farm full of Canadian art and culture, a Curator of Canadiana, a Professor at the U. of T., a Visiting Curator at the Smithsonian, have to do it? I did not leap with any glee. There was a sense of vocation and a sense of civic action. One can laugh at it, one can praise it, but it’s genuine.

Place d’Armes, published in 1967 by McClelland & Stewart and here republished by Dundurn Press, captures this precise moment in late 1965 and its break with life success, career competence, bourgeois heterosexuality, and social respectability.

It is nearly impossible and perhaps unnecessary to sum up the thirty-four years of Symons’s life following his decision to leave behind his Toronto world. It is fair to say that whatever judgment posterity may have about the decision itself and about the literary work that it permitted, the “demissionary” himself lived out the full consequences of his act in the years that followed. After trying for a time to hold his marriage together in the context of his now-overt bisexuality and need for a sexual life including men, Symons broke definitively with the marriage and lived a great passion with a young man, John McConnell, who at the time of their meeting was not yet eighteen. Flight to Mexico ensued, where the lovers were pursued by the Mexican Federal Police at the instigation of their families in Toronto.

Symons liked to joke that the Canadian Honours System saved his life when he won a prize for best first novel and returned to Toronto to collect it. He was able to finish and publish Civic Square, begun between the writing of Place d’Armes and its publication.⁴ This second published work was an extraordinary, unbound book-in-a-box, the Toronto counterpoint to Place d’Armes, again centred on a public square and seeking to deepen a sense of Canadian meanings through close attention to our built heritage.⁵ An internal exile with John McConnell followed: he spent time in British Columbia in the lumber woods and embarked on a “furniture safari” that resulted in the writing of Heritage: A Romantic Look at Canadian Furniture in the west coast Newfoundland fishing village of Trout River.⁶ Eventually, Symons’s relationship with McConnell ended, and in a movement of shock and reconstruction he spent time in Mexico teaching at PEN workshops in San Miguel de Allende and eventually settled in Morocco, which he had earlier visited, almost accidentally embarking for Marrakesh rather than Mallorca on a holiday from London. From those experiences between 1970 and 1974 came the three volumes of the Helmet of Flesh trilogy. Only volume one has so far been published — in 1986.⁷ (All of Symons’s books appeared originally with McClelland & Stewart.)

In “Notes Toward a CV” in the 1998 Gutter Press anthology, Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons, Symons gave a tender and compact assessment of what twenty-three years in North Africa had meant to him:

[T]he role of Morocco in Scott’s life (1971 to the present) has been large. It gave him hearth & haven. Allowing him to take his stand, hang tough, and bear witness. Armed with fluent French (Morocco is part of La Francophonie!) he could live joy (much), sustain his rooted Canadian meanings intact, and … grow. What he loves in Morocco is their sense of dance, music and the pipes of Pan. And their incredible smiles ...

There were periodic returns to Canada, often connected to a writing or media project (“Canada a Loving Look” — Globe and Mail, 1979; “house writer” for The Idler in the late 1980s; et cetera) or the launch of Nik Sheehan’s film and my anthology in 1998, but Symons remained faithful to the nourishments and the contemplative possibilities of Morocco until forced to leave by urgent personal circumstances in 2000. He and his Canadian lover and partner in Moroccan life for almost twenty-five years, Aaron Klokeid, also separated at that point.

Symons spent the last years of his life in Toronto dependent upon the goodness of friends, the remainder of a last bequest from his lifelong supporter and correspondent Charles Taylor, and what little income he could earn from writing and royalties. He published a few pieces in the National Post, worked on a novella, Kali’s Dance, based upon his last experiences in Morocco, and drafted elements of a memoir, none of which were brought through to publication. His health gradually deteriorated until, finally, suffering from diabetic brownouts and for all intents and purposes homeless, his dearest friend, Mary-Kay Ross, was able to arrange for him to take up residence in Leisure World, a continuing care facility on St. George Street.

Scott had written that “I quest the right death.” I recall him saying to me in Rasoir, Morocco, looking south over the wall behind his magnificently simple home (like that of a high Roman official in retirement) to the brush and seemingly endless dry lands beyond, “When it’s my time, I’ll take my motorcycle and see just how far south I can go. I want to disappear into Africa. No one will ever know what happened to me.”

Circumstances are our masters, as Blaise Pascal said. Symons’s “sunset time” was to be spent in slow decline in Toronto rather than in an eschatological African road movie. Those of us who knew him in those last years, who visited him occasionally with sadness and trepidation in the dreadfully reduced circumstances of the euphemistic Leisure World, found him to be unfailingly gentle, engaged, unreconstructed, still himself. I will not forget his bravery on the occasion of our last lunch together.

The rest of this introductory essay was originally written before Scott Symons’s passing and focuses on the achievement of Combat Journal for Place d’Armes.

From One Place to Another

New Year’s Eve, 2007, Dakar. First day of a two-week stay in Senegal. I dare myself from the Novotel into the unknown avenues, leaning steeply (a very Scott word) toward La Place de l’Indépendance. The newness of the African night, the strangeness of the streets, the rush and flare of fireworks overhead, and the brief, bright volleys of sharp firecrackers underfoot all combine for an uncanny, elevated perception.

I’m thinking, too, of another Place, of Scott Symons’s remarkable, durable, influential achievement, Combat Journal for Place d’Armes.

From one Place to another then, which seems oddly fitting, utterly right. Place, with all of the bilingual signifying power that Symons evokes and analyzes in his “novel.” A place, a site, a space, spaciousness itself, spaciosity of inwardness in its conjunction with the real. An inner sanctum, for intérieur, inner Château, to use the language of the mystics, as Symons sometimes has. As he puts it in Day Five of Place d’Armes, La Place is “the inmost world” (146).

Back in my hotel room — after failing to reach La Place, driven here by pickpockets and shady followers. On with the TV, looks as if it will be an Al Jazeera kind of New Year’s, but then I see it: the Church of Notre Dame on Montreal’s Place d’Armes in the film The Whole Nine Yards with Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry, a movie about a Montreal dentist’s conflict with his new neighbour, resettled American hit man Jimmy “The Tulip” Tudeski.

There it is, the very church that grounds and founds the extraordinary ecstatic Canadian novel I have in my bag, rearing up on the small screen in this African hotel room. It can’t be relegated to a background, not to a mere beauty shot, not even in such a limited, competent exercise of light entertainment. To my utter amazement, La Place really is everywhere. I hear the roar that Symons sung. I did not expect it to come rushing in on Senegalese cable.

Laughing, I remind myself that my task remains the writing of something like an introduction for something cleverly disguised as a novel.

“I have come to sight La Place for others ...” (96)

Place d’Armes Today

Place d’Armes, originally published as a dissonant and dissident centennial gift to Canada from its author, a Toronto curator, professor, and journalist on the run from stifling respectability, is a classic of our literature and one that retains remarkable power to fascinate, to enervate, to confuse, to provoke, to arm and disarm the reader (who is always Dear Reader to Scott Symons).

Expressing a multi-faceted crisis of identity, Place d’Armes was written as it was lived in a three-week period in late 1965. It is a text born of the same sense of foreboding that gave us, at almost precisely the same moment, George Grant’s Lament for a Nation. It may be thought of as the last will and testament of the last British North American, a High North American Tory who knows that his culture is in stalemate and who is trying to invent forward metamorphoses for it. It is also a founding moment for gay literature in Canada and an open, utterly honest plea for liberty of sexual expression and largeness and generosity in conceptions of love and sensuality. It is a transgressive literary text that plays havoc with generic modes, mixing diary, fiction, thinly disguised autobiography, and cultural commentary. It is a work that even challenges our sense of the book as a predictable, easily definable object and the novel as a recognizable category. Yet there is a narration here, characters, and an effort to find good forms. But they are complex and imperfect forms submitted to the larger necessities of an existential quest.The book overflows with bold and exciting solutions to almost impossible representational challenges.

The overlaid voices and typefaces marking out the various modes (journal, novel, novel within the novel, parodic or documentary asides, and digressions, et cetera) are dizzying, perhaps a little bewildering. The reader must really read this text. And that is part of Symons’s intentions. His “narrators” do not do everything for us but rather lead us deeper and deeper into the real and virtual city, the concrete and the symbolic Place. It may be said that all culminates on Day Twenty-One in a moment when the fictional creation of Hugh Anderson, Andrew Harrison, himself turns to writing a novel, the main character of which is named ... Hugh Anderson. With this move we have a kind of internal looping, a metafictional recognition of the book’s complexities, a mise-en-abime of unity: Symons writing Anderson writing Harrison writing Anderson writing Symons. Day Twenty-Two, the day of the final and definitive communion scene, can only happen after the recognition of this unity and it brings all of those presences together. We might even say that it is precisely that multiplicity, that “host” that is held together, allegorically elevated and held up in monstrance at the centre of La Place in the closing orchestrations of the novel.

Two other points concerning the originality of the book are worth mentioning for readers just discovering Symons. First, Place d’Armes is part of a three-book sequence, a trilogy. In Place d’Armes, Hugh Anderson remarks upon the necessity of a diptych, a Tale of Two Cities. Civic Square, the Toronto novel, the book-in-a-box, hundreds of unbound pages in a mock-Birks gift box, was to follow in 1969. But the diptych, too, required fleshing out, more Body and Blood, another spatio-temporal or conceptual dimension in Symons’s constant quest for enriched dimensionality, an enhanced spaciosity that the language and atmosphere of the mid-1960s allowed him to call “4-D.” Heritage:A Romantic Look at Canadian Furniture (1970), the third installment in the trilogy, seems like a coffee table book, a connoisseur’s treatise, un beau livre. But it, too, practises genre-bending. Symons does not so much describe the works of early Canadian furniture-makers as intersect lovingly with their histories, their lives, their characters. It is really a furniture novel, as Irving Layton is reported to have remarked.

The status of the three books themselves as objects has also been much discussed by observers and admirers. Place d’Armes was published in hardback in a format that reflected the nineteenth-century journal used by Anderson in the story, including jacket pockets containing marked-up maps, postcards, et cetera. There is a page at the end that is simply the reproduction of a notebook page with phone numbers, appointments, notes, and lists. Stan Bevington of Coach House Press designed the book and contributed immensely to its originality. In Nik Sheehan’s film, God’s Fool, Bevington reminisces about reading Symons’s manuscript (delivered by his wife) and making a trip to Montreal to reconnoitre the routes of the narrator. “When I came back it was really clear that we had to put in objects, that we had to make the book an object, as discussed in the story. We had to make an object that was hard, not floppy. Through discussions with the production people at M&S there kept being obstacles so I said, ‘OK, I’ll do it.’” And do it he did, earning a later compliment from the ultra-demanding Symons: “Stan still thinks at fingertips.” All of this contributes to blurring the distinction between the finished volume and the process and the means of its writing and its material form. For Symons it cannot be a matter of polished, achieved, closed fiction, something has really happened to someone and something should happen to the reader. Equally, something has come into the world in that exercise of creativity and life affirmation.And that thing is no dead, remote object, but something to be touched, to be held.

It is difficult to disagree with Peter Buitenhuis’s assessment in his introduction to the 1978 McClelland & Stewart paperback, that Place d’Armes is a supreme statement of the Canadian imagination of the 1960s. It certainly ranks alongside such other canonical English-Canadian texts as Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Graeme Gibson’s Five Legs, or a little later, Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business. And it must also be situated in relation to the most significant works of the period in French Canada, with which Symons was deeply familiar, notably Prochain Episode by Hubert Aquin (Robert K. Martin goes so far as to call it “almost a translation” of Aquin’s book).

In its unleashed psychic and libidinal energies, its avant-gardist formal logics and hugely ambitious syncretic/synthetic aspirations, Symons’s book is certainly representative of some of the decade’s wider and wilder possibilities. But Place d’Armes is also idiosyncratic, anachronistic, sometimes reactionary, even as it participates enthusiastically in headlong literary (post)modernity. Symons’s first novel and his subsequent works find their own way in a negotiation with millennial cultures and the acceleration and transitional qualities of the contemporary. In the early 1970s he remarked that “Today is very exciting, but I don’t want to live in it” and asserted that “we’re living between two minds today.”⁸ The moment to which Symons’s work belongs is not narrowly contemporary.

(Parenthetically, it is interesting to note how Place d’Armes situates itself so explicitly in relation to other works of the 1960s highlighted in the 2005 Literary Review of Canada’s list of the one hundred most significant books in Canadian history.⁹ “I cry too little for the sensibility” when all our intellectuals moan “too little for their minds” [55] evokes Hilda Neatby’s So Little for the Mind. The text engages the thought of Marshall McLuhan intermittently, already taking that proper name as synonymous with reading media. Place d’Armes also takes note of the recent Lament for a Nation by George Grant [though, remarkably, the polymorphous/polyvocal narrator notes that he has not read it and does not need to]. The novel that Hugh Anderson is sketching out in the Combat Journal is referred to by one witty friend as a “minority report to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.” Mocking but informed reference is made to Stephen Vizinczey’s In Praise of Older Women. And Hubert Aquin and Prochain Episode are vitally present in the text through the figure of Pierre Godin, with Anderson reading his novel, La Foire aux Puces, and noting Godin/Aquin’s suicide obsession, the liberating power of an “assurance-vie” consisting of a bottle of cyanide. It is fascinating to ask oneself if, in the current flowering and multiplication of Canadian writing, there might be such a strong sense of historical moment, of culture and commonly recognized stakes, if one were to examine key works of the first decade of the twenty-first century forty years hence ...)

Academic criticism of the novel (or anti-novel) has come in two waves, so to speak, with some crucial early articles focusing on questions of genre, narration, identity, and religion and a second constellation of concentrated critical interest associated with postmodern critical stances deriving insights into the text from gender and queer studies and postcolonial literary theory.¹⁰

Two statements will serve to condense the general tone of these interpretative moments:

These sophisticated journals remind us, as does so much recent Canadian literature, that evolution is preferred to Revolution, that what is great in the past can be adapted to give strength to the present. (Elspeth Cameron, 1977)

We would not want to lose a text as rich, as outrageous, as powerfully evocative of its time as Place d’Armes, but it is necessary to read it defensively, ready to take up the combat that Symons wants. Its limitations speak eloquently to the problem of writing the other, of speaking from a position of privilege while seeking to efface it, and of the ways in which a jouissance that seeks to undo the (cultural) text may end up simply rewriting it. (Robert K. Martin, 1994)

Each generation of critics, while arguing for strengths and weaknesses of the book, seeks to recuperate the difficult-to-contain text and maintain it in a positive relation to essential and diverse contemporary critical or ethico-critical perspectives. For Cameron it is the secret continuities between the contemporary manipulation of the diary, the production of a radical Combat Journal, and the many earlier historical manifestations of journals in Canadian culture. For Martin it is the desire to maintain a powerful text of transgression, resistance, and pleasure in spite of certain of its apparently politically distasteful aspects.

While each of these clusters of articles provides rich insight into the textuality, genericity, ideological underpinnings, cultural meanings, and consequences of the text, sometimes the singularity of the text eludes the interpretative models imposed upon it. To wit:

Terry Goldie: “Place d’Armes only reacclaims the misogyny of Tory heterosexism in a Tory homosexualism.”

Robert K. Martin: “One problem with Symons’s project is that it amounts to a kind of literary blackface, the performance of sexual or racial identity.”

Such statements seem to this reader demonstrably false, over-determined by their theoretical starting points, and necessarily reductive of texts that are infinitely more subtle and idiosyncratic than these reductions allow. But this is not the place to make an extensive demonstration or counter-argument.

By way of further introduction, let us consider just a few ways into Place d’Armes, a few avenues traced by Symons into the allegorical Place. The way is fraught with obstacles, but the obstacles also provide the way forward. With Hugh Anderson in the Rapido train, on the Day Before One, we are held trembling at a threshold: “unwilling to resolve the contradictions already becoming apparent” (45).

Passionate Impasse

Impasse. The word and the phenomenon haunt the quest of Symons-Anderson-Harrison. He is constantly faced with and sometimes briefly tempted by the “instant security of stalemate ... the security of impasse” (235–36). In the early going, when Hugh is on the Rapido train en route from Toronto to Montreal, his first unsatisfying encounters with his fellow citizens leave him with the feeling that all that can be attained in his urgent but as yet undefined “sensibility probe” is a kind of “improved impasse” (60), with Canadian decorum serving as an obstruction to feeling, an excuse for the avoidance of life. (Hence also the provocative opening disclaimer, “any resemblance to people dead or really alive is pure coincidence”). But Symons’s whole work rebels against the risk of “consecrated impasse” (174).

By the end of the exhaustive and exhausting writing out of the adventure, such impasse has metamorphosed, multiplied, opened up, become “Holy Impasse” (384) and at the precise moment where failure seems most likely, a successful breakthrough into realms of enhanced consciousness occurs. This is a paradoxical exit with no exit. An empassioning aporia, to speak like the Jacques Derrida of Demeure, where he analyzes the paradoxical death/non-death by firing squad of Maurice Blanchot in the latter’s At the Instant of My Death.¹¹

Importantly, Symons himself is fascinated by the need for such enhanced passion and by the limited resources of the English language to convey it. In an act of translation that is cultural and spiritual more than it is narrowly linguistic, he considers the French passionnant: “there is no expression in English like c’est passionnant — literally it is empassioning” (282).

The work of Scott Symons is empassioned and empassioning or it is nothing. And it derives its passion from the experience and transformation of impasse.

A Text of Resistance

Place d’Armes must be read and experienced as a text of resistance: the book ferociously resists all forms of reductive, identitary thinking. It seeks to preserve sentience, lucidity, the articulation of education and sensibility as against the homogenizing tendencies of our time. It attacks official culture in its various guises, and in particular the obsession with the Canadian identity and its careerist “mechanisms.” The intersecting discourses of media/advertising/tourism/business are called into question from the opening pages of the book in a Radical Tory critique of the incipient formations of what we might call today late or information age–capitalism. Symons has an undoubted, instinctive respect for institutions but abhors what large corporate structures, be they private, like the “Mommy Bank,” or public, like the federal civil service, can do to a person’s openness to life. As he puts it in his brief biography at the end of the volume: “Status: A Para-Canadian, released from any allegiance to the Canadian State but obsessively devoted to the Canadian nation.” He is concerned with the “man,” the human being and the human consequences of accepting such restrictive modes of consciousness and expression, the effects of surrender to the “world of memo” and “mere competence.”

It is surely no accident that the “novel” begins with a flat imitation of a tourist blurb about historic Place d’Armes. Symons’s initial narrator, Hugh Anderson, is appalled at the ease with which he is able to produce this competent but empty approach to La Place. The false distance that it implies is precisely that reduction of the human to an alienated consumer, of a culture to its merely cultural effects, a reduction that Symons will combat in this book and in all of his published and unpublished work. He knows that the risk of failure is high, as is that of ridicule, but he must try.

“Que veux-tu? It’s my last chance ... my own people have put our cultures into national committee. They have deliberately killed any danger of a positive personal response.” (100)

The resistance of the “demissionary” is precisely the existential affirmation of a positive personal response.

Twenty-five years after the resignation from Toronto respectability, the démission that became a life mission, Symons recalled the choice in these terms:

The choice risked my life because it risked my sanity. I knew that this was where one had to move, to open the doors to male sentience. T.S. Eliot said that if he hadn’t pursued the path he did — a very dry life — he would have gone in the direction of Durrell’s Black Book. I’d read that before I jumped. At the same time, women’s lib was just beginning to explode. I couldn’t go to another woman because I already had the woman of my choice. I have always found it odd that I am considered the black wolf of CanLit. I’m a very conservative guy who went to Easter Mass at Saint Thomas’s. I’m a quiet person and in many ways timid. I was brought up with a deep sense of civic participation and commitment.¹²

Defence and Illustration

Place d’Armes and all of Symons’s published work seeks a language adequate to the kind of heightened experience upon which he gambles all. Symons’s language is enlivening, empassioning, neologizing, inventive, sensitive to the evolution of English, forward-looking in its assumed heritage of the freedom of the modern avant-gardes, but rooted in place and in history, and, of supreme importance, in a constant rapport of translation with its nearest other, French.

Some of the strategies utilized by Symons include alliterative punning (e.g., “the Nicean niceties”); discombobulating prefixes (e.g., impatriate for expatriate); transforming proper names into verbs (e.g., he Michelangeled me); the development of new compound nouns frequently to describe the kind of radical sensorial/emotive/conceptual shifts he intuits (e.g., umbilink, cocktit, assoul, manscape); the development of signifying and significant identity abbreviations that can be reused in the novel (e.g., ECM, Emancipated Canadian Methodist).

Aural punning on homonyms is also a favourite tactic of Scott Symons who frequently underlines the difference (or differance) of writing and orality. Phallacy is one particularly nice find, pointing as it does to a critique of phallocentrism in a writer sometimes accused of “hypervirility” or even “misogyny.” For Symons the male sexual organ is at the centre of the “perceptor set” joining self and world, but it is always, like so much else in this work, set off, relativized, in relation to inner, spiritual connections. And to the truths of language speaking itself. Phallacy argues gently against the risks of the narrowly phallic, the too-literally male, the vainly cock-focused.

Carnal joy, joy incarnate, then isn’t joy made by carnal manipulation, by mere phallacy ... it is a rejoicing at the world I already know ... it is quite simply the perception of that world, at any moment, eternally. Eternity intersects time at the moment, that ...; the moment that you see — really see. And makejoy is killjoy. Phallicity is fallen ... (267)

At times such punning, neologizing play might seem emptily clever, willfully mechanical or forced, but as Elspeth Cameron has pointed out, “The word play in Place d’Armes … is not mere sophistry. As in Joyce, it is part of the breakdown of fixed forms which recreates the cosmic flux of experience.” The moments of maximal linguistic extension and uninhibited inventivity occur at points when the Communion vision, the slipping into 4-D, seems to be at hand (though we must note that the final experience of the work is that of ellipsis, the spent and holy silence of the blank page).

Much of Symons’s writing confronts the mysteries of mystical participation in the universe. Examples of sensory shift, even of synesthesia, when one mode of sensory apprehension overlays or replaces another, abound. Some crucial moments occur in the Church when the candles, on various visits, confront Hugh-Andrew-Scott with their roaring. At one point this extends to a total vision: “The sight of their sound was heaven” (246). This is an impossible representation, yet one that Symons will repeatedly endeavour to have his readers experience, sublime failure after sublime failure.

When Symons refers to himself as a “Canadian de langue française” (96), he not only establishes a relation to French Canada that is non-appropriative, respectful of its difference, and respectful of the ground of its attainments, but he cunningly-punningly situates his artistic project at the intersection of two languages and indirectly asserts a cultural entitlement to that Other. In particular Symons will push the boundaries of English to capture the lived consequences, the pull, the feel of quintessentially French structures, particularly reflexive verbs, creating not-quite-correct pronominal structures like “I seat me” or “I write me” or “It sufficed him” (394). The relation between self and world is thereby underlined, rendered slightly strange, heightened or exacerbated; it is part of the opening that Place d’Armes enacts: “I am living me in French, being lived in French,” he exclaims revealingly at one point, yet he is “writing me in English” (285). Much of the singular force of the language in this work derives from this simultaneous existential translation.

Communion

I would say that anyone who sat down with my three books could have no doubts at the end of the three as to what it was I was going through. Anybody could see that I was negotiating my way through a series of secular experiences — of blatantly secular experiences — and trying, through them, to find the spiritual. I was trying to find sacramental reality. And my effort — again this is where I’m not a writer — my effort is not to explain these experiences to the reader, but rather to put the reader through them.¹³

Symons, through the adventure and the proof of his text, aspires to a quasi-sacramental yet heterodox incarnacy, the Real Presence of Catholic theology passed through very radical modern freedom. He seeks to make revelation of profanation after having made profanation of revelation, in a useful turn of phrase belonging to French poet Michel Deguy.¹⁴ “He thought again of the Communion. That was the verity … of Body and Blood. It was inevitable if not yet completely achieved.” (385)

Communion takes many forms in the work, and the economy of ingestion, swallowing, digestion, assimilation, and transformation is operative in everything from lunch dates to fellatio to the close observation of furniture and buildings. “You eat the site till it is inside you, then you are inside it, and your relationship is no longer one of juxtaposition ... but an unending series of internalities. It’s like looking at mirrors in mirrors ... or rather crystal balls in crystal balls. That’s my job now ... to reinsite the world I’ve nearly lost.” (126) The swallower swallowed would not be a bad subtitle for the work as a whole. “Eschew the historic plaques. Eat the building.” (140) In the ecstatic yet dominated orchestration of conclusion, Holy Impasse has become procreative impasse, a substantial transformation, the breakthrough to “4-D,” a swallowing that is a swallowing up, total communion. The swirling, poetic evocations of Day Twenty-Two have been read in strikingly divergent ways by critics, but whatever the dominant images might be, the logics of porosity, vulnerability, penetrability, ingestion, and violability are operating at full capacity by this point:

no longer was there any question of details, of itemization ... all that had gone now ... he was confounded, in utter conjugation with the body of the Church — it was militant in him. He turned — and staggered out ... the Place d’Armes was outrageously alive in him ... (395–96)

Conclusion: “You Hate Them Almost as Much as You Love Them”

There are scenes of Place d’Armes where “the monster from Toronto” — as Robert Fulford called Hugh Anderson (and by extension Scott Symons) in an infamous and damaging review — comes to the surface, notably in the interactions with Rick Appleton, who functions as a scapegoat for sellout, almost an evil twin, the enemy or at least a frère ennemi. One cannot deny or downplay the anger and the spleen in the Anderson-Harrison-Symons complex. But the deep meaning of Place d’Armes is a hating through to love, another reinvention of impasse: “art is love — even an art of hate is love — the optimum of despair — creating despair in hope of hope” (361).

“‘You hate them almost as much as you love them ...’” remarks a perceptive antiques dealer as she observes Hugh Anderson devouring and demolishing the English-Canadian customers passing through her store (116). What terrifies and enrages Anderson is a deadening of sensibility, an increasingly abstract, technified relation to life, a growing corporatization of society, a diminishment of honour in relation to career, increasing greed, creeping amnesia, reduction of potency, smothering of spirituality. Yet Symons the culture critic is always secondary to Symons the joyful participant in life. The efforts of the Combat Journal pay off, in the end. They allow for the transcendence that joy affords and a true sighting of the richness of the fabric of what is given in the literal and allegorical City:

I realize that what has been restored to me these past days is my self-respect. I have gone through Hell for Heaven’s sake ... and found my human dignity. Bless Meighen’s eyes, bless the chalice, bless the Mother Bank and the Great White Elephant and the Flesh Market and the Sphinxes Large and Lesser and the Wedding Cake and the Greyway and the Front and Holyrood. (368–69)

Symons’s text is finally just that, a restoration: last words and blessing for his cherished, unknown readers, a figural return to an inner place that can never be fully grasped but which is always real, immanent in all of life’s moments.The final image of the text, an outstretched finger bursting with life and blood points there.

Place d’Armes is an act and a gift of love. It is a masterpiece in contemporary composer Pierre Boulez’s terms, “something unexpected which has become a necessity.” One that new readers will gratefully receive in this timely new edition.

Selected Biographical Sources

Gibson, Graeme. Eleven Canadian Novelists. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1973.

The Idler. Interviews with editors.“The Decade of the Last Chance,” No. 23, May/June 1989. “Deliquescence in Canada,” No. 36, July/August 1992.

Symons, Scott. “The Long Walk” in Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons. Toronto: Gutter Press, 1998.

____. “Notes Toward a CV by Scott Symons” in Dear Reader:Selected Scott Symons.

____. “Rosedale Ain’t What It Used to Be.” Toronto Life, October 1972.

____. “The Seventh Journey (A Last Letter to Charles Taylor).” Toronto Life, September 1997.

Taylor, Charles. Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1977).

Selected Critical Sources

Briggs, Peter.“Insite: Place d’Armes.” Canadian Literature, Summer 1977.

Buitenhuis, Peter. Introduction. Place d’Armes (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart paperback edition, 1977).

____. “Scott Symons and the Strange Case of Helmet of Flesh” in The West Coast Review, Vol. 21, No. 4, Spring 1987.

____. “Scott Symons” entry in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Cameron, Elspeth. “Journey to the Interior: The Journal Form in Scott Symons’ Place d’Armes.” Studies in Canadian Literature, Summer 1977.

Dickinson, Peter. Here Is Queer: Nationalism, Sexualities and the Literature of Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Elson, Christopher. “Mourning and Ecstasy: Scott Symons’ Canadian Apocalypse” in Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons. Toronto: Gutter Press, 1998.

Goldie, Terry. “The Man of the Land, the Land of the Man: Patrick White and Scott Symons.” Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Fall 1993.

____. Pink Snow: Homotextual Possibilities in Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2003.

Martin, Robert K. “Cheap Tricks in Montreal: Scott Symons’ Place d’Armes.” Essays on Canadian Writing, Winter 1994.

Piggford, George. “‘A National Enema’: Identity and Metafiction in Scott Symons’s Place d’Armes.” English Studies in Canada, March 1998.

Young, Ian. “A Whiff of the Monster: Encounters with Scott Symons,” Canadian Notes & Queries, No. 77, Summer/Fall 2009.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all parenthetical page references are to this edition of Place d’Armes.

2. Tim Wilson interviewed Scott Symons in Essaouira, Morocco, in June 1997 for Vision TV. He was kind enough to provide me with the unedited footage of this interview from which I have extracted this phrase.

3. In this biographical sketch I make use of the following sources: Charles Taylor, Scott Symons chapter in Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1977, 191– 243); Scott Symons interviews in The Idler No. 23 (May/June 1989) and No. 36 (July/August 1992); “Notes Toward a CV” in Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons, edited by Christopher Elson (Toronto: Gutter Press, 1998), 309–14, and “The Long Walk,” ibid., 303–08; various interviews conducted with Christopher Elson in 1995 in Essaouira, Morocco; unpublished texts, diaries, and drafts.

4. Civic Square, the “book-in-a-box,” is the second part of what Scott Symons always referred to as his Tale of Two Cities. Picking up from the formal liberties and material inventivity of Place d’Armes, in certain respects it is the most singular of his published works. An unbound book counting in the hundreds of pages, contained within a parodic simulacrum of a blue Birks gift box, every copy was personally signed by Symons and decorated with his trademark flying phalli, an illustration of the movement of Eros. The work connects the High Tory spirit of Rosedale with the emergent hippie spirit of Yorkville and gives us a multifaceted “Torontario.” Symons left a copy in the collection plate of St Thomas’s Anglican Church in memory of his father Harry Symons. In this book there are many episodes, investigations of sites ranging from Nathan Phillips Square to Mosport Park, from the Blythe Folly Farm in Claremont to Chestnut Park Street in Rosedale to the Toronto Art Gallery’s “Op-Pop” Ball. In the 1997 documentary God’s Fool, painter David Bolduc and curator Dennis Reid speak with intense fondness of Civic Square’s ability to draw together “urban ferment” and “rural transcendence.” It contains a plethora of lyrical quasi-poems and didactic asides, mini-essays, rants, pseudo-prayers, as well as a polemical history of English literature, a celebration of dappled Country Canada, an ode to cocks (and cunts), a Canada prayer in the mode of an Our Father, intense typologies of Canadian personalities, descriptions of birdlife, the “yella-fellahs,” yellow warblers, and much else. Throughout Symons holds nothing of his linguistic playfulness back. One passage builds to an expression that the author begged the publisher to allow him as title — The Smugly Fucklings.

5. The main character of Place d’Armes is in a very deep way the square itself — La Place, in Scott Symons’s intensely personal usage. The historic public square located in Old Montreal and bounded by Notre-Dame Ouest, St-Jacques Ouest, St-François Xavier, and Saint-Sulpice streets is the site of a range of architectural and monumental forms ranging from Georgian-Palladian to Neo-Gothic, from Art-Deco to High Modernist. A nineteenth-century sculpture by Louis-Philippe Hébert of Sieur de Maisonneuve, situated in the centre of the square, harkens back to the earliest moments of the settlement, Ville-Marie, and the epic character of the establishment and defence of the seventeenth-century colony.

Harold Kalman’s A History of Canadian Architecture (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994) mentions Place d’Armes in several places. It was the site of the first Bank of Montreal headquarters constructed in 1818–19, and with each addition to the bank’s properties, innovative and nationally important approaches were taken. Kalman also gives a fascinating account of how Notre Dame, “the most important landmark in the early Gothic Revival,” emerged from the competition among parishes and the desire of the Sulpicians to make a major statement by bringing in a foreign architect (James O’Donnell, a New York Irish Protestant!). Kalman’s text provides in a very condensed form some of the same factual, historical information dispersed throughout Symons’s more lyrical text and puts Place d’Armes at the centre of Canadian architectural evolution.

In her foreword to Montreal Metropolis 1880–1930, eds. Isabelle Gournay and France Vanlaethem (Montreal/Toronto: Canadian Centre for Architecture/Stoddart Publishing, 1998), Phyllis Lambert, founder and director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, underlines this “initial duality of religion and commerce” (6). She plays off the very different Place d’Armes and Dominion Square as capacious and generous sites of some of Montreal’s necessary cultural and urbanistic accommodations: “The architecture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Place d’Armes and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dominion Square is paradigmatic of Montreal, a city accustomed to change and to accommodating opposing values, able both to absorb the shock of the new and to create the variety of urban structures and infrastructures called for by the twentieth century.” (7)

A small pamphlet in the Quebec National Library, apparently self-published in 1968 by philosopher and theologian Michel Bougier, emphasizes the Catholic and French-Canadian elements of the square, including the importance of the International style Banque canadienne nationale building by architectural firm David et Boulva. But it is in considering the church that Bougier is at his most eloquent: “It is sweet and good to find oneself, on some wintry afternoon, in the grand, nearly deserted vessel. Its sombre and contemplative atmosphere encourages one to reflection, to just desires, to good will.” Symons’s apocalyptic communion must be set against this rather tamer vision of spiritual life.

Finally, perhaps the best single source of information and inspiration relative to Place d’Armes may be found in a text by Maryse Leduc, architect, which accompanies the book of cut-outs of buildings in the square prepared for Héritage Montréal by Conception-EditionsARC and available for purchase online at www.copticarchitecture.com/a.htm. Leduc bridges the competence of the architectural historian and the excitement of the urban dweller who finds herself enlivened by the “event” of this phenomenal ensemble of buildings. “At once both contemporary and classic, the square is truly an urban event, a place that enhances the buildings that enclose it. It is a pleasure for the eyes, inviting them to discover there a detail ornamenting a doorway or the grand interiors [sic] spaces that extand [sic] the square. The views and vistas that the square offers are each as impressive as the other, forming both tableaux and individual landmarks in the city.” (2) With its emphasis on the informed pleasure of seeing, on the conjugation, as Symons might have said, of interior spaces with the urban landscape, Leduc is very close to Symons’s perception of the “insite” of the sight.

Other sources for those interested in Place d’Armes include Marc Choko, Les grandes places publiques de Montréal (Montreal: Editions du Méridien, 1990); Madeleine Forget, Les gratte-ciel de Montréal (Montreal: Editions du Méridien, 1990); and Monique Larue with Jean-François Chessay, Promenades littéraires dans Montréal (Montreal: Québec-Amérique, 1989).

6. Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture (McClelland & Stewart, 1971; republished in the United States with the New York Graphic Society), with photographs by the still-prolific John Visser, completed the first trilogy. The book is an anatomy of furniture, a “furniture novel,” as Irving Layton is reported to have said. Leonard Cohen told Scott that he had done something very clever, producing a “hand grenade disguised as a coffee table book.” The volume’s long concluding essay, “Ave Atque Vale” (“Hail and Farewell”), is an account of the “furniture Safari” from southwestern Ontario to St. John’s, Newfoundland, taken by Symons and his lover in 1970. It evokes landscape, old, rooted Canada, the personalities and places associated with the most significant finds of Canadiana. Furniture is faith, Symons repeats again and again. The philosopher George Grant wrote the preface to “this splendid book” and noted that in it “Symons shows us consummately that the furniture of any time or place cannot be understood as a set of objects, but rather as things touched, seen, used, loved, in short, simply lived with through the myriad events which are the lives of individuals, of families, of communities, of peoples.”Who else but Scott Symons, reminiscing about a French-Canadian armchair, a chaise à la capucine, could persuasively argue, in the midst of intense connoisseurship and curatorial precision, that contact with such a chair constituted a breach of his marriage? “That was in 1959 — my core attained. My smug opacity ended.”

7. Helmet of Flesh (McClelland & Stewart, 1986; also published in New American Library in hardback and paperback editions) owes its existence to the editing of Dennis Lee, who helped bring the thousands of pages of draft into something resembling a coherent whole. Helmet I describes the arrival in Morocco of Symons’s alter ego York MacKenzie and a series of wild misadventures which ensue. There is a trip into the High Atlas with a band of misfit Englishmen that cannot end well. Constantly present in the overwhelming Moroccan setting, through flashbacks, letters, and photographs, however, are Osprey Cove, Newfoundland, and London, England. Simone Weil is a tutelary presence here with her spirituality of extreme attention, as she is in the still-unpublished installments of the second trilogy. There are remarkable set pieces in which Moroccan realities challenge and transform the sensibility of the main character, particularly through the experience and reading of carpets, the uncanny attractiveness of Moroccan music, and some crowd scenes in the Medina of a rare descriptive power. It is to be hoped that someday Waterwalker and Dracula-in-Drag may also be published.

It is important to note that Michel Gaulin has translated Helmet of Flesh into French as Marrakech (Québec-Amérique, 1997) and that his translation of Place d’Armes was published in the fall of 2009 with Montreal’s XYZ Éditeur. The French translation of Helmet of Flesh received some excellent reviews.

Excerpts from the unpublished volumes may be found in Christopher Elson, ed., Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons (Toronto: Gutter Press, 1998).

8. Eleven Canadian Novelists, interviews with Graeme Gibson (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1973), 310.

9. Literary Review of Canada, November 2005.

10. In the first group: Elspeth Cameron, “Journey to the Interior: The Journal Form in Scott Symons’ Place d’Armes” (Studies in Canadian Literature, Summer 1977); Peter Briggs,“Insite: Place d’Armes” (Canadian Literature, Summer 1977). In the second: Terry Goldie, “The Man of the Land, the Land of the Man: Patrick White and Scott Symons (Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Fall 1993); Robert K. Martin, “Cheap Tricks in Montreal: Scott Symons’ Place d’Armes (Essays on Canadian Writing, Winter 1994); George Piggford, “‘A National Enema’: Identity and Metafiction in Scott Symons’s Place d’Armes” (English Studies in Canada, March 1998); Peter Dickinson, Here Is Queer: Nationalism, Sexualities and the Literature of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

11. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

12. Interview in The Idler, No.23, May/June 1989, 29.

13. Eleven Canadian Novelists, 317.

14. Michel Deguy, Arrêts fréquents (Marseille: Métailié, 1991).