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