Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons

       To T.W. and J.S.

       without whose love

       this book would not have

       been possible

       And to all those who have made this book necessary

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

COMBAT JOURNAL FOR PLACE D’ ARMES

THE DAY BEFORE ONE

DAY ONE

DAY TWO

DAY THREE

       DAY FOUR

       DAY FIVE

       DAY SIX

       DAY SEVEN

       DAY EIGHT

       DAY NINE

       DAY TEN

       DAY ELEVEN

       DAY TWELVE

       DAY THIRTEEN

       DAY FOURTEEN

       DAY FIFTEEN

       DAY SIXTEEN

       DAY SEVENTEEN

       DAY EIGHTEEN

       DAY NINETEEN

       DAY TWENTY

       DAY TWENTY-ONE

       DAY TWENTY-TWO

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