Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons
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tea together (it wasn’t a “drink” — that was what happened in novels; and he smiled.) Beatrice had “died” a few months ago, heart failure, under an oxygen tent — and then been revived and come back to tell about it. She would know. He tried — between the lines — to tell her what he was really doing … tried to tell her that he knew that the novel was for real. He wanted to tell her of the hara-kiri explicit in it. But it was hard to acknowledge fear to someone who has already died and come back. That strengthened him again. And at 4:45 p.m. he was on board the Rapido …
“the Rapido! the very name pillages me of more blood. Part of the mediocre anonymity of the New Nation. An evasion of identity. An abstraction. Might as well call it the ‘Quickie’ — the Cdn Quickie.
But that would be too American. At least the CPR has the guts to be the Chateau Champlain … or the Royal York. Well — the new name matches the new ticket booth matches the new Canadettes in the booth matches the Respectable Hick matches the New Flag matches the new entry to the train itself … from the main floor of the thermal bathroom. I got a new respect for that great arched Roman Bath as I saw in contrast the board-and-batten triumphal arch all of eight feet tall through which we went to the train. Red-white-blue archlet — not the old colours, grim old colours, full of gristle and gut, but these new candy-floss colours. (Oh, Christ, even the colours of my community are undergoing a change of life — are being gelded!) At the arch entry a professional greeter welcomes us in. Rolls out the cheap red carpet for all of us members of the new lower middle-class Canadian royalty. Pathetic.Plush for the people.
Why can’t I be proud of it? I should be. It is clean, competent, fresh, proper. It even has this mitigated concern for majesty — the plush carpet, the stage-set entry, the self-effacing CN impresario to grimace us at entryway … I suppose because it makes me by definition part of these New Canadettes. A sort of post-graduated folk-yeoman-king…. Hell — why should I be proud of it? This isn’t what my people spent two centuries here for! Even if I wanted I have no right to be proud of it!
Dumped my bags on the rack between cars #3012 and 3011 … & slump into a seat — lucky got one by a window, facing forwards (dislike riding backwards). Ten minutes to go … catch up on my Notes.
… 4:45 p.m., sharp, the station moves away from us … leaving me exposed sudden to the body of my city … out the back corner of my eye that becalmed Beaux-Arts bulk, rising like a series of improved Buckingham Palaces piled atop each other — the Royal York, could only be she
the long slit unended of Yonge Street — like all our streets — dissolved only by infinity
with that wedding-cake turn-of-the-century prestige bank at the lower left-hand corner — Front Street corner: a kind of gaudy bodyguard for the longeststreetintheworldthatisYongestreet ending only in our Ontario Lake District. Bank of Montreal, at that!
with its back square upon me, the squat cube of our beer baron’s art centre: O’Keefe
overtopping all these, the soft-nosed phallicity of Bank of Commerce — circumspect, uncircumcised — 32 stories of Canadian self-satisfaction
the new National Trust tower, well below
& below again, prickly up these closed commercial shops, the spired incisions of the old City of Churches — Saints James & Michael &Metropole
&, last link with the old city, Osgoode aside, St-Lawrence-Market- where-Jenny-Lind-sang
pinched by the Victorian gabling from Jarvis Street East … even gables in Toronto are Presbyterian spinsters’ eyes on my wayward trainside
Gooderham ’n Worts stone distillery — 1832: THERE is the REAL HOY culture … Honest Ontario Yeoman — Hoyman — none of this nostalgic log cabin cult … but cubic yards of squared stonework — behind it, the high windows and gratuitous lantern of Tuscan Revival blocks (if only they would repaint these!)
a minute, a panorama of 2 centuries passed … to the free flowing muck of the Don River — where Founding-Governor Simcoe’s wife fished for fresh salmon! What could she think now of this shit-sluice?
Anal canal for 2 million congested citizens! And all the valleyside of it superways with some guilty pretence at parkland
squat huddle of houses … one, two, five, seven minutes … the Emancipated Methodist Culture of Canada! … Cdn squatters — our national smugliness — small, stolid bungalows; unlike anything in the Yewnited States — smaller, thicker, squalider. Someday we’ll clear the land of these affluent slums — in revenge for the lost White Pine we cleared first to house them….
a trickle of land … apologetic almost — extinct landscape!
redbrick belfry & white cornicings cuddle me kinetic to the land for spring — of course: the Church at Dunbarton — rural Ontario Ecclesiological — as specifically Ontario as the French-Cdn parish church is Québec … want to shout the news out to the traincar … but am silenced by the sight of she-man opposite me
glut of bungalettes again — more modern now
the Ugliest City in Ontario — easy laureate: Oshawa — cartown
Queen Anne’s Lace, Milkweed pod, St. John’s Wort … all the sun flushed earthenware of Ontario winter garden of the open fields (want to shout — “do you see these? — look — our winter garden …” but the eyes in front of me are deaf) — snow-pocked field furrows … sudden woodland shimmers bronze of wintered beechleaves
at horizon spruce palisade (sharp eyes, like those spinster gables!) alerts me to the orchard that must arrive & cedar hedge, overgrown, and hip-rooved bulky barn, stone root house, & same stone foundations to the blockhouse home red-and-white brick trimmed that completes this Chateau-fort of our HOYman. Massive, impenetrable, us! Nowhere else in our wide bloody world but Ontario … Southern Ontario: Home — damn it, and blessings
more bungalows distress the site — unworthy, unworthy — God — UNWORTHY offspring
Spiresides — Port Hope … & on the knoll behind, overlording the factories beneath its notice almost but not quite, Cdn Eton (for better and for worse) — Trinity College School — vestige of the disestablished upper Canadian Anglican Genteel State (but choose your enemy then — this … or the bungalettes! Sweet choice.)
that impasse resolves sudden with the grace notes in conscientiously squared lines between the great cubed fieldstones that amass an eternal yeoman stone Georgian home — Canadian Fabergé, these stone houses: cameos out of rich stone-sown earth to clear those near generations thrust abruptly by now to be restituted in only a retroactive nostalgia for tourists and the New Nation: as though killed for a better Resurrection. Each one still a gem — legacy rebuking the preflab culture around it … Cobourg … & now the dark.
How well I know this route — our Ontario Front, Niagara to Montreal — 500 miles of us. Ontario Foundation line, and front door to our estate of ½ a million square miles. In each town,