Scott Symons; He dreamed of writing the Great Canadian Novel, but he will be remembered most for his outrageous lifestyle and rough personality (Great)
Hyfler/Rosner
His life was his art. Alas, it was not a masterpiece
He dreamed of writing the Great Canadian Novel, but he will
be remembered most for his outrageous lifestyle and rough
personality
SANDRA MARTIN
February 28, 2009
Short, with a dark complexion, smouldering brown eyes and a
thick helmet of black hair, Scott Symons had a chunky
wrestler's body and a magnetic personality. He could
energize a gathering simply by being there, but could just
as easily unleash his voracious narcissism, suck all the
oxygen out of a room and verbally flail his nearest and
dearest.
Born into a prosperous, well-connected Toronto family,
equipped with a fierce intelligence, a passionate curiosity,
and the literary ambition to break out of his predestined
establishment mould, he dreamed of writing the great
Canadian novel - a visually creative and sexually
revolutionary work that would liberate readers, and empower
them to embrace hedonistic experience and shrug off the
complacent shackles of postwar Canadian society.
He wrote three novels, including what is arguably CanLit's
first openly gay novel, but he will be remembered most for
his outrageous lifestyle, which began in scandal and ended
in poverty and illness, his political and cultural
journalism about post-Duplessis Quebec and his book
Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture, an
imaginative and culturally provocative treatise with
photographs by John de Visser and a preface by George Grant.
As a fiction writer, Mr. Symons could craft visually charged
scenes, as though he were wielding a paint brush instead of
a pen, but he had profound difficulties in stepping back
from his material and establishing a distance between
himself - the author - and the characters he created to
espouse his polemical and homoerotic views on the "lived"
life. As for absorbed experience, the bedrock of all
fiction, he paraded it raw. Perhaps his biggest mistake as a
writer was his obsessive journal-keeping, an addiction that
began in his mid-20s. He recorded everything in his Combat
Journal, as he called his diary, which then became,
seemingly without selection, the sprawling stuff of his
fiction.
His life was his art. Alas, it was not a masterpiece.
He affronted family, alienated friends and lovers and
destroyed relationships by wantonly inflicting pain in the
most flagrant and public ways without any semblance of
remorse. At 34, he abandoned his wife and small son to run
away with a 17-year-old boy - with outraged parents and
police in hot pursuit. Vicious in print, he attacked the
character and writings of friends including Margaret Atwood,
Graeme Gibson, Bill Glassco and Robertson Davies.
His closest and oldest friend, the late journalist and
essayist Charles Taylor, supported Mr. Symons emotionally,
intellectually and financially, and wrote, in Six Journeys:
A Canadian Pattern, what remains the most perceptive profile
of Mr. Symons, a 1977 biographical essay that is empathetic,
knowing and revealing.
Mr. Taylor was not his only champion. The late Jack
McClelland, his publisher, believed he was "one of Canada's
most important writers." Poet and editor Dennis Lee, who
spent more than a dozen years wrestling Helmet of Flesh into
a publishable manuscript says that Heritage, the furniture
"novel," and Helmet will secure Mr. Symons's writing legacy.
A LIFE BEGINS
Hugh Brennan Scott Symons was born in the early years of the
Depression, the fifth of seven children of Major Harry and
Dorothy (nee Bull) Symons. His father, a fighter pilot in
the First World War, made his living in real estate, and won
the inaugural Stephen Leacock Award in 1947. His
British-born grandfather, William Limberry Symons, had
designed Union Station and many of the houses in the
exclusive Rosedale enclave where the Symons family lived,
and founded the Ontario Society of Architects. On his
mother's side, the Bulls were United Empire Loyalists.
Mr. Symons grew up surrounded by books, traditions and
culture and "thinking highly of himself," according to his
youngest brother, Bart Symons. After attending Rosedale
Elementary School, he was, according to Mr. Taylor, "already
showing signs of a moody truculence," a rebelliousness that
his parents hoped to curb by sending him to board at Trinity
College School, a private boy's school in Port Hope, Ont.
Although he hated everything about the school - except Mr.
Taylor - he was an excellent student.
"Charles was shy and diffident, Scott was self-assured and
authoritative," said Mr. Taylor's widow Noreen.
"And TCS being what it was, they shared a skepticism on the
life of privilege and the worthiness of privilege for its
own sake that never left either of them."
At TCS, he fell in love with another student, a love he
repressed by becoming a gymnast, "a form of athletics which
suited him because it was solitary and ritualistic, with a
touch of grace," Mr. Taylor wrote. He practised obsessively
and one night, alone in the gym, he fell off the high bar
and broke his back. He was immobilized in a body cast for
several months.
While it is tempting to speculate that being trapped in a
body cast is symbolic of the way Mr. Symons felt encased by
society, what we know for certain is that that he moved back
into the cocoon of his parents' home after the accident and
spent his final year of high school at University of Toronto
Schools, an elite boys school in the centre of the city.
That fall he entered Trinity College in the University of
Toronto, where he enlisted as a naval cadet, sat on student
government and excelled academically, earning a slew of
scholarships and medals along with a bachelor's degree in
modern history in 1955.
Instead of revelling in his triumph, he skipped the ceremony
and spent the day working at a part-time job at Woodbine
racetrack - perhaps a sign that he wasn't going easily into
the dark establishment night. Nevertheless, he went up to
Cambridge that fall as a student of F. R. Leavis at King's
College.
About this time he became engaged to Judith Morrow, a
childhood friend and a bank president's daughter, and
returned to Toronto to take up a short-lived job on the
editorial page of The Telegram. After being asked to write a
report surveying the paper's editorial policy over the
previous 50 years, he said it had deteriorated miserably and
was soon shown the door. He and Ms. Morrow were married on
March 1, 1958.
Two months later the newlyweds had settled in Quebec City,
where Mr. Symons took a job with The Chronicle-Telegraph,
improved his French, and moved so easily in Québécois
intellectual circles, dominated by Andre Laurendeau and
Jean-Louis Gagnon, that he was invited to join the St. Jean
Baptiste Society - the first non-francophone and
non-Catholic member, as he liked to boast.
By the autumn of 1959 Mr. Symons and his wife were in Paris,
studying French literature and grammar at the Sorbonne. They
returned to Canada a year later with their newborn son,
Graham, because Mr. Symons had been offered a reporting job
at La Presse. The end of the Duplessis era - the autocratic
premier had died the previous year - was a propitious time
for a bilingual outsider to sniff out political and
intellectual ferment, and Mr. Symons made the most of it
with a National-Newspaper-Award-winning series of 25
articles in 1960-61 that presaged the coming Quiet
Revolution. Indeed, he said later that he had coined the
term.
Although his family and hers had frowned upon his career
choice, Mr. Symons had considerable prowess as a journalist.
But success frightened him and with his customary
restlessness, he quit La Presse, moved back to Toronto with
his family, and took a job as an assistant curator in the
Canadiana collection of the Royal Ontario Museum.
Again, he seemed to have found his métier. Within three
years he had been appointed curator and assistant professor
of fine arts at the University of Toronto and granted a
sabbatical, which he spent as a visiting curator at several
august institutions in the United States. He gave a
memorable public lecture, complete with slides, at the
Smithsonian, in which he compared the "full-bodied and
orotund" Quebec weather-vane roosters with flat and
one-dimensional American "cocks," as his stunned audience
slowly grasped that they were on the losing side in a
lecture on comparative cultural eroticism.
Mr. Symons was intent on kicking against the pricks, a
defiance that he tried once too often with his superior at
the ROM, who fired him for insubordination. Unable to
abandon the field of battle, he turned down a permanent job
at the Smithsonian so that he could pursue his self-styled
vocation as "a kind of priest of the chapel of Canadiana."
A LIFE GOES WILD
Back in Canada at the 50-acre farm in Claremont, Ont., that
his wife had bought from her husband's family, he began and
abandoned a book on Canadian history, and, perhaps
deliberately, messed up an audition for This Hour Has Seven
Days, the provocative television show that seemed suited to
his talents and tastes. The Symons universe was unravelling.
He fled the farm and holed up in a small hotel in Montreal.
In an obsessive 21-day outpouring, he produced his first
novel, Place d'Armes, an autobiographical torrent about Hugh
Anderson, an English Canadian, who wants nothing more than
"the right to love my country, my wife, my people, my
world," a goal that he can only achieve by reclaiming his
emasculated soul through sexual intercourse with male
Quebecois prostitutes in the square (La Place) adjoining
l'église de Notre Dame.
Critical reaction was not mixed when Place d'Armes - Mr.
Symons's centennial project - was published in 1967. Writing
in the Toronto Star, under the headline, "A Monster From
Toronto," cultural critic Robert Fulford castigated Mr.
Symons's gauzily veiled protagonist as "the most repellent
single figure in the recent history of Canadian writing" and
criticized the author for being incapable of writing with or
about love.
A savaged Mr. Symons licked his wounds in Yorkville, which
was enjoying its sexually liberated heyday, by cavorting
with all manner of libertines, including two statuesque and
begowned black transvestites whom he invited to a family
party hosted by his in-laws.
He was also creating his second novel, Civic Square, an even
more unwieldy manuscript that was the English Canadian
counterpart to Place d'Armes.
A massive collection of polemical letters addressed to Dear
Reader, it was printed as a nearly 900-page unbound
manuscript (Anna Porter, then an executive editor at M&S,
insists she ran the Gestetner machine) and was packaged in a
blue box, a symbolic reminder of a gift package from Birks,
the tony establishment jeweller. As a final flourish, Mr.
Symons drew birds, flowers and a red phallus on each page as
it came off the assembly line.
By now Mr. Symons had more serious preoccupations than
rampaging book critics, although Civic Square did receive a
favourable notice from writer Graeme Gibson in The Globe
Magazine. The year before, Mr. Symons, 34, had run off with
John McConnell, the underage son of a prominent Canadian
family. The lovers lived for a time in the lumber camps of
northern B.C. and then fled to Mexico with the police in hot
and fruitless pursuit. Coincidentally, Mr. Symons received a
minor literary prize - the Beta Sigma Phi Best First Canada
Award - while he was on the lam. He returned to Toronto to
pick up his laurels and his $1,000 cheque, and a formal
meeting with his disaffected wife, who, not surprisingly,
had begun divorce proceedings.
And so Mr. Symons began the long nomadic phase of his life,
living variously in Trout River, a west coast Newfoundland
village, where he wrote much of the text for Heritage, his
furniture book (which would eventually be published, again
by M&S, in 1971), the Mexican expatriate artists colony in
San Miguel de Allende, where he began writing Helmet of
Flesh, and mainly in Morocco, where he lived and loved and
wrote for more than two decades in Essaoira, a walled
medieval town, where he seemed most in harmony with himself,
his new lover Aaron Klokeid, and his cultural and physical
environment.
Periodically he returned to Canada: in 1970 as he researched
his furniture book; in 1986 for the launch of Helmet of
Flesh at a lavish party hosted by Mr. Taylor; and in 1998 to
attend the International Festival of Authors at
Harbourfront, where Nik Sheehan's documentary film about
him, God's Fool, was being screened and Christopher Elson's
anthology, Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons, was being
launched.
Mr. Symons always claimed that he was homosexual, not gay,
by which he probably meant that he didn't embrace the gay
liberation movement as a defining political and social
cause. He wasn't seeking equality, he was railing against
the real foe - the Blandmen - the establishment types that
he felt had betrayed Canada's British and French heritage.
Frequently lonely and depressed, often suicidal, perpetually
broke, he was dependent on the indulgence of friends,
especially as his job prospects dwindled and his health
deteriorated. He smoked, drank and ate prodigiously and
suffered over the years from diabetes and kidney problems.
In 2000 he returned permanently to Toronto. By then Mr.
Taylor had died, his final bequest had been spent, and Mr.
Symons was on his uppers and "a postscript to his own life,"
according to one friend. He spent his last years at Leisure
World, where some of the faithful continued to stop by and
take him out for a meal or celebrate his birthday. "Rightly
or wrongly, wisely or unwisely he had divorced himself from
the family," said his youngest brother, Bart. Nevertheless,
Bart Symons "almost in fear" of a confrontation, made the
train trip from his home in Stratford last August to visit
his older brother, who was in St. Michael's Hospital because
he was having trouble breathing. "He was an absolute
sweetie," and so a five-minute duty call became a lengthy
and emotional visit. "It was an incredible event and he was
so glad I had come and in hindsight so am I."
SCOTT SYMONS
Scott Symons was born in Toronto on July 13, 1933. He died
there on Feb. 23, 2009, after several years of ill health.
Mr. Symons, who was 75, is survived by his son Graham, five
siblings, and his extended family.